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?
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2 Answers
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.
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5Why would you not call it a good idea to alias ls to
ls --colororls --color=always, for that matter?– j08lueApr 8, 2015 at 13:38 -
11@j08lue if you pipe through a command that doesn't handle color, you get some junk characters that may mess up the command. For example, I did
ls --color=always | lessand got:ESC[01;32mexecute_once.shESC[0m(I know this is old and you probably don't care, but for future visitors, this may be useful) Jun 30, 2015 at 16:51
Try less with the -R option like this:
command | less -R
This works for me in a one-liner like this:
ls -la | grep --color=always bash | less -r
And like this too:
ls --color | less -R
But you have to tweak the primary output (the output of ls in this case) a bit with the --color parameter.
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Thanks, this also works for ack-grep. ack-grep my_string --color | less -R Jan 30, 2014 at 14:25
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1--color is not recognized: ls: illegal option -- - Running bash on osx.– SMBiggsOct 17, 2014 at 17:04
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1@Scott Biggs: in OSX there is no --color; try ls -G– user262186Jan 3, 2015 at 6:34
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