Linux – Colors in bash after piping through less

bashlesslinuxlsshell

When I have dircolors defined life is full of… color.

When I pipe ls through less to scroll around I lose the colors.

Any suggestions?

Best Answer

Most likely your ls is aliased to ls --color=auto, which tells ls to only use colors when its output is a tty. If you do ls --color (which is morally equivalent to ls --color=always), that will force it to turn on colors.

You could also change your alias to do that, but I wouldn't really call that a good idea. Better to make a different alias with --color.

less needs -R too, which causes it to output the raw control characters.

Related Solutions

Bash – How to determine if a bash variable is empty

This will return true if a variable is unset or set to the empty string ("").

if [ -z "${VAR}" ];

Ssh – What do you do when a command floods your terminal with too much output

Try using screen. http://www.gnu.org/software/screen

You can switch to another shell and continue working on something else while the output completes and has the added advantage that the output will not be sent to your remote link if you are not watching it.

There is also support for buffer scrollback in screen, so you can page or search through the output when it is done.

If you are not using screen, ^C is not responding and you really need to terminate the job, you may want to try '~.' (the default ssh interrupt) to terminate the ssh session. You may need to hit enter before typing '~.'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – How to determine if a bash variable is empty

Ssh – What do you do when a command floods your terminal with too much output

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