unix api naturally:
say you fork your terminal application and execute "ls -l" in the child, why won't the color and the formatting etc... appear in the output? I've got it just printing the plaintext output.
Is there a way to do it through perhaps piping?
You probably have an alias set up for ls which turns on color output. When you exec ls, pass it the "--color=yes" option to enable color.Originally Posted by keira
Type 'alias' in your shell, you'll probably see an alias there.
--color=auto, which ls is usually mapped to with alias, is a better idea, because it doesn't try to print colours when the output isn't a console -- when the output is redirected to a file, for example. (Otherwise, with --color=yes, you'll probably get lots of ANSI escape sequences.) But maybe --color=yes is what you want, I don't know.
BTW, you can see the currently set aliases by typing "alias". And you can set them like so:
(I made up that output, alias might actually print things slightly differently.)Code:$ alias gcc='gcc -W -Wall' $ alias gcc='gcc -W -Wall' ls='ls --color=auto' $
alias is built into your shell, which is probably bash. Just in case you're curious.
dwk
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