Linux – Keep color in less after make and pipe

bashlesslinuxmakezsh

I would like to keep color in less command after using "make 2>&1" to compile some program. There are similar topics with "grep" and "ls" commands but solutions do not work with this command.

For instance,

make 2>&1 | less -R

does not work.

Thanks for your help.

Best Answer

The simplest solution is:

unbuffer make |& less -r

This is based on the answer to Preserve colors while piping to tee

I had to "sudo apt-get install expect" to get the unbuffer command installed.

Note that the "-r" option for less tells it to display ANSI color codes, while using |& pipes in both STDOUT and STDERR.

Related Solutions

Mercurial. Colour output piped to less

For mercurial, you should use the pager extension rather than piping explicitly to less. This will play nicely with the colored output options of other hg commands.

Bash – How to Emulate a TTY to Preserve Piped Color Output

It's not less that needs to change. The output of your other programs is being redirected to a pipe. Those programs detect that their output is not being sent to a tty and they disable their coloring. You're stuck with having to do something special with the source programs to color their output even when redirected to a pipe.

I think I have a solution for the programs that do not support a --color=always option. The unbuffer command creates a pty and sends the output of its argument program to that pty, therefore the argument program thinks its output is going to a tty and colors it.

I tried the following as an experiment and it worked. I couldn't think of any programs that color their output by default.

$ unbuffer ls --color=auto | cat

Also, don't you have to use the -r option with less to get it to display color? I also tried this:

$ unbuffer ls --color=auto | less -r

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Mercurial. Colour output piped to less

Bash – How to Emulate a TTY to Preserve Piped Color Output

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