color and redirection?

[Mikel]

I've been messing around with 'ls -G' (directory with colour) and tried to redirect the output to a file and see if any colour info was retained. It didn't seem to.

'ls -G > file'
'cat file'

Anybody know how to could keep the colour info, or if it's possible?

 

[rbb]

The color is just in the terminal, it has nothing to do with the file names themselves. There is not a way to have the colorized output redirected.

 

[davidbrit2]

It's actually quite easy. Add this option to ls:

--color=always

Otherwise it'll detect that it's sending output to a pipe rather than a terminal and deactivate printing of color escape codes.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Doesn't work for me... Also, redirecting with the ">" operator is much different that redirecting with a pipe ("|").

 

[rbb]

Actually, since the output of the command is sent to stdout, and > and | both redirect stdout, they are basically the same. Only > sends to a file, and | sends to stdin of the next command.

you have to remeber, most everything on a UNIX machine are files, and files are streams of ASCII bytes. STDOUT/STDERR/STDIN are all files, so you can deal with them the same way you deal with text files/data files/etc...