Comment by theamk

6 years ago

I don't see how this is supposed to work? Let's take "grep" for example -- you want both of these to work, and print color to terminal:

    grep box file.txt
    grep box file.txt | grep -v orange-box

Having --color=always is nice sometimes, but there is a reason grep has "--color=auto" and it is the default. If we write invisible characters to file, this breaks all sorts of tools, so it is much safer and more predictable to not include them.

2 comments

theamk

inetknght 6 years ago

If I wanted to see just orange-box, then I would do

    grep --color=always orange-box file.txt

But, I don't want to see just orange-box. I want to see orange-box and compare against other cases of box. So I would do:

    grep --color=always box file.txt | grep --color=always orange-box

Without that --color=always, other cases of box will be drowned out by the noise.

And if I wanted to write that out to a file then I would do

    grep --color=never orange-box file.txt > matches.txt

Alternatively, I'd add a filter to the file with `ansi2txt`

    grep --color=always box file.txt | grep --color=always box | ansi2txt > no-color-matches.txt

rixed 6 years ago

I think the point the person you are replying to was trying to make is that in your proposed sequence of colored greps, the second one would not catch the "orange-box"es because of the extra chars added for coloring the output of the first grep.
Maybe grep should ignore ansi sequences optionally or by default, to solve this?