Linux Desktop Hacks

50

|

Chapter 2, Console

#15 Colorize Files in Your Pager

HACK

By not specifying tty or auto, the ls command will output color no matter

where the output is directed.

There’s a catch to doing things this way, so before you edit the file that

defines the alias command, try the technique manually so that you can see

for yourself what the catch will be. Follow these steps to set the default

behavior for both

ls and less to support color, and then perform the piped

output command to see a listing of files in color:

$ alias ls='ls --color'

$ alias less='less -R'

$ ls -al | less

There you go—colorized output in the less pager.

Now that

ls automatically outputs color no matter where the output is

directed, try this command to redirect the output of the colored directory

list to a file:

$ ls -al > directory.txt

Now open the file with your favorite editor, and you should see all the codes

used to colorize the text. For example, you might see something like this:

[[01;34mDesktop[[00m

[[01;31mEiosource-1.1-1.i386.rpm[[00m

[[01;34mGNUstep[[00m

[[00mHello[[00m

[[00mKernel-Win4Lin3-2.6.6.patch[[00m

Your editor doesn’t interpret the codes to colorize your text. It simply shows

you the codes that exist in the output of the command. This is not quite

what you want when you redirect output to a file, is it?

So, here’s a way to deal with the first solution. You can modify your alias

settings so that the following command produces ...