How to keep colored output using sed

colorslsosxpipesed

I'm using the sed command and I want to keep colored output from the previous command. The output of ls is colored, but the output of sed is not. I'm using OSX.

ls -la | sed -En  '/Desktop/q;p'

Best Answer

On macOS, the ls is not GNU ls and does not accept the --color=always option that Linux users might expect for this functionality.

In the macOS version of ls, the colors are controlled by two variables: $CLICOLOR and $CLICOLOR_FORCE. If the former is defined, the terminal specified by $TERM supports color, and the output is to a terminal, then this output will be colored, much like GNU's --color=auto option. If the latter variable is defined as well, the final condition is dropped, behaving like GNU's --color=always.

So to have color passed through to sed, you would need something like the following:

CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 ls -la | sed -En '/Desktop/q;p'

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Many programs that generate colored output detect if they're writing to a TTY, and switch off colors if they aren't. This is because color codes are annoying when you only want to capture the text, so they try to "do the right thing" automatically.

The simplest way to capture color output from a program like that is to tell it to write color even though it's not connected to a TTY. You'll have to read the program's documentation to find out if it has that option. (e.g., grep has the --color=always option.)

You could also use the expect script unbuffer to create a pseudo-tty like this:

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Best Answer

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