EDIT:
I would like to make a recommendation that parsing colors is a generally ill-conceived idea.
Part of why i wanted it was so I can both parse it and pass it along in my own script output. This is... okay, but it would probably be saner to use porcelain or some such and re-build the colored parts myself!
Original question follows.
I like to see color because my scripting is robust enough (so far) to handle the color codes. It does seem like I'm going against the grain here, but I honestly don't see what the big deal is about having to parse stuff like escape codes in scripts. If colors help for interactive use, why wouldn't they help in script use where I might be aggregating data and crunching even more data than I would manually? Wouldn't colors be even more important?
Anyway, I have a neat little shell script I wrote that munges git status
output, and i'm just looking to make this script keep the colors intact. My global git config is set so that the lists of changed and untracked files show up in color in the git status. Unfortunately unlike git diff
there is no option for forcing color for git status
that I can find.
To be abundantly clear, this is the issue:
$ git status
produces perfect output, but (excerpt from my script follows)
git status | sed "s/^#/\x1b[34m#[0m/"
produces no colored git status
output, and you can even see here that I'm explicitly converting the leading hash-characters to blue because it helps highlight the different regions of output from my script.
Does anyone know how to get it to put out the colors? Is there maybe a standard program I can use that can be used as a "fake terminal" STDIN/STDOUT pipe? I am in fact also working on a pty pseudoterminal tool so I could certainly make use of that for this purpose, but it's a rather heavy-handed solution (and not ready for use yet as I haven't finished building it).