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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 ...