less is more, and even more with color
05 Jun 2009
I’ve just discovered how to colorize less output, It may seems unimportant but I really prefer to colorize my life when possible.
$ ls -la --color |less -R
The colors are defined by editing the ~/.bashrc file
# Less Colors for Man Pages export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' # begin blinking export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;38;5;74m' # begin bold export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' # end mode export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' # end standout-mode export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[38;5;246m' # begin standout-mode - info box export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' # end underline export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;38;5;146m' # begin underline
The same trick can be used for other commands who output colorized messages (except for those who they detect when stdout is going through a pipe such as grep):
$ tree -Ca /sys/ | less -R
More color codes can be consulted at: http://ascii-table.com/ansi-escape-sequences.php.