If I run ls I get colored output which I find pretty handy for quickly getting a glance of the kind of file. When I try to pipe it to less even with the -r and -R flags the coloring always get lost. I am using zsh version 5.0.7. Any ideas? Thanks.
edit: I am on OS X.
This is by design: programs that produce colored output typically do so only when their output goes to a terminal, not when it's sent to a pipe or to a regular file. The reason is that data sent on a terminal is presumably read by a human, whereas data piped to a program or written to a file is likely to be parsed by some program, so it shouldn't contain extraneous content like color-changing escape sequences.
GNU ls displays colored output on a terminal when you pass the option --color (or --color=auto). To force colored output regardless of the file type of the standard output, pass --color=always or --color=yes (they're synonyms). This convention has been followed by other commands, like GNU grep, FreeBSD grep, git diff, etc.
ls --colors=yes -l | less
With the FreeBSD version of ls (also found on OSX, and available as the colorls port on OpenBSD and NetBSD), pass the option -G to display colors when the output is a terminal. Set the environment CLICOLOR_FORCE to display colors regardless of the output file type.
CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 ls -l | less
eslint), you have to use --colors and pipe to less -r.
– Raine Revere
Dec 31 '20 at 19:36
The problem most probably is that your ls program has set option --color=auto which basically means that output should be coloured only if it is connected to terminal, otherwise (output connected to a pipe or a file) no colors are emitted.
If you want to have colors is such cases you should set --color option to always, so try
ls --color=always | less -R
If this behaviour is what you expect all the time then just create alias:
alias ls='ls --color=always'
ls doesn't come from bash, it is standalone program. Run ls --version to check its version. Mine is ls GNU coreutils) 8.21.
– jimmij
Feb 18 '15 at 22:13
ls version doesn't have the --version flag. I am using the default one from OS X, not sure if that helps.
– nunos
Feb 20 '15 at 18:59
I can't comment @jimmij 's answer, because I have less than 50 rep, but I would like to explain what worked for me in Bash.
If you run
$ man ls | grep color
you will see all the entries of the man-page for your specific shell environment (in our case bash).
For me the following adjustment did the trick:
$ alias ls='ls -G'
-G flag has nothing to do with how ls manages its colored output. That just removes the groups from the output of ls -l. It does affect color output in BSD ls (the one used on OSX as well), is that what you mean? In any case, I don't think that will show color when redirected to a file, it will just show color on the command line.
– terdon
Feb 20 '15 at 19:12
lsis being invoked with--color? Try suspending the pipeline (^Z) or usingpsfrom another terminal. What output doeswhich lsproduce? – zackse Feb 18 '15 at 17:04less -rso it is not an issue withlessbut withls– terdon Feb 18 '15 at 18:31lsresult depends on stdout). The one I remember is http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/157285/why-does-ls-wc-l-show-the-correct-number-of-files-in-current-directory which itself is marked as duplicate of http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10421/output-from-ls-has-newlines-but-displays-on-a-single-line-why – jimmij Feb 18 '15 at 22:28ls --color=automeans use color only when writing to a terminal (i.e., when the standard output is a terminal), and not when it's a file or a pipe. – Scott - Слава Україні Feb 18 '15 at 22:34which lsoutputsls: aliased to ls -G– nunos Feb 20 '15 at 19:00CLICOLOR_FORCEas explained in Gilles' answer. – terdon Feb 20 '15 at 19:15