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I've got a file that's full of VT100 color codes, which is making it hard to search. Is there a unix utility that can strip those out so I'm left with plain text?

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  • Trying to cleanup the output of a script run? I remember there was a script that did exactly this on some system I used to have access to... I think it was the University of Waterloo Math Department's Unix machines. But I think some clever bastard there wrote it a while ago. Find a friend still at UW :)
    – MikeyB
    Jun 24, 2010 at 4:05

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Try catting it through col -b

cat file | col -b

This works for stripping the troff/nroff formatting for man pages. Worth a try.

If that doesn't work, there's quite a good thread on perlmonks:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=132997

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This might help:

esc=$'\033'
sed "s/${esc}[^m]*m//g" inputfile
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  • sed s/$'\033'[^m]*m//g works like a charm for me - thanks!
    – reinierpost
    Aug 22, 2023 at 12:40
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the strings command possibly!

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  • I tried that, it leaves a bunch of [01;34m strings
    – jes5199
    Jun 23, 2010 at 19:12
  • ok then pipe it to sed with the appropriate edits and yes there's got to be a better way.
    – tony roth
    Jun 23, 2010 at 19:18

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