What UNIX commands support coloured output?

Question

I enjoy using UNIX/bash commands that support coloured output. Consequently, I have a few aliases defined which automatically enable coloured output of the commands that I know support this option. However, I'm sure there are hundreds of commands out there that support coloured output - I'd like to know what they are.

The ones in my ~/.bash_aliases file are:

ls --color=auto
grep --color
phpunit --ansi

What else is there? Is there a list somewhere of all commands that support coloured output? Or better still, some command for grepping my local man pages and plucking out the appropriate command names.

Answer 1

Why don't you try:

man -K color

That should search for the word color in all your man pages (content, not just headings).

It asks, for each man page, whether you want to open and view the page:

$ man -K color
/usr/share/man/mann/Widget.n.gz? [ynq] y
/usr/share/man/mann/usual.n.gz? [ynq] y
/usr/share/man/mann/Toplevel.n.gz? [ynq] n
/usr/share/man/mann/itk.n.gz? [ynq] n
/usr/share/man/mann/Archetype.n.gz? [ynq] n
/usr/share/man/man8/squid.8.gz? [ynq] n
/usr/share/man/man7/Xprint.7.gz? [ynq]
/usr/share/man/man7/X.7.gz? [ynq]
/usr/share/man/man7/urxvt.7.gz? [ynq]
/usr/share/man/man7/term.7.gz? [ynq] q

$

Inside each individual man page, you can use your normal search method (e.g., /color<ENTER>) for finding the text. When done with a man page, just exit and it will continue searching.

Answer 2

When looking at logs, you might enjoy tail -f /var/log/messages | loco for colorized output.

There's a screenshot at the loco website and more examples at http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2008/01/02/perl-script-to-add-nice-colors-to-your-varlogmessages-file

Answer 3

This demo bash script colours directories red in most terminals - certainly works in xterms and cygwin under Windows. You can adapt the colours by fiddling with the escape codes - Google for LS_COLOR for lists of colour codes:

#!/bin/bash

color_red()
{
    echo -e "\033[01;31m$1\033[00m"
}

for FILE in $*
do
    if test -d $FILE
    then
        color_red $FILE
    else
        echo $FILE
    fi
done

Answer 4

I'm quite fond of coloring my prompt so that it stands out. A useful article on that sort of thing is available here.

Answer 5

A quick bit of google search also reveals grc and grcat, which can be used to colorise any arbitrary text or command. Not sure how well they work though. I'm certainly going to try them out now that I've found them.

Ah, here we go. grc uses the /etc/grc.conf file to colorise a given command based on which regexp it matches. A quick grep of my (Ubuntu 8.10) /etc/grc.conf reveals it currently has support for:

[~]$ less /etc/grc.conf | grep '^#'
# anything to do with irc
# log file
# ping command
# traceroute command
# gcc command
# make command
# netstat command
# diff command
# last command
# ldap tools
# cvs command

But I'm sure you could add your own for other programs you are interested in.

To use grc, simply put it before the command you want to colorise (lets say diff):

grc diff foo.txt bar.txt

And you could certainly alias diff='grc diff' to make diff colorised by default.