Pipe to less but keep the highlighting

highlightinglesspipesyntax highlighting

Is it possible to pipe output (e.g. dmesg) to a command like less (or equivalent) and keep the text highlighting used by the original command?

example: on the left dmesg | less on the right dmesg

<code>dmesg | less</code> vs <code>dmesg</code>

Best Answer

Use the --human parameter to view colored dmesg output in a less-like environment.

dmesg --human --color=always

Or use the short version:

dmesg -H

Alternatively, use the following command to achieve similar results.

dmesg --color=always | less -R

Many other utilities that produce colored output (ls, grep, etc.) have a similar --color=always option.

Related Solutions

Grep – Getting Colored Results When Using a Pipe from Grep to Less

When you simply run grep --color it implies grep --color=auto which detects whether the output is a terminal and if so enables colors. However, when it detects a pipe it disables coloring. The following command:

grep --color=always -R "search string" * | less

Will always enable coloring and override the automatic detection, and you will get the color highlighting in less.

EDIT: Although using just less works for me, perhaps older version require the -R flag to handle colors, as therefromhere suggested.

Less – How to Syntax Highlight via Less

You can use GNU's source-highlight, as shown here (path may differ, see below):

 export LESSOPEN="| /usr/bin/src-hilite-lesspipe.sh %s"
 export LESS=' -R '

As of Debian Stretch and Fedora 25, package names and script paths differ

Debian:

sudo apt install libsource-highlight-common source-highlight
dpkg -L libsource-highlight-common | grep lesspipe
# /usr/share/source-highlight/src-hilite-lesspipe.sh

Fedora:

sudo dnf install source-highlight
rpm -ql source-highlight | grep lesspipe
# /usr/bin/source-highlight/src-hilite-lesspipe.sh

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Grep – Getting Colored Results When Using a Pipe from Grep to Less

Less – How to Syntax Highlight via Less

Related Question