How to save input colors in awk?

Putnik

7/22/24, 5:10 PM

I've seen many more or less related topics, but all I found discuss how to color awk output. I need to preserve the color that was provided as awk input. For example, now I have:

./some_command
(red_text) (blue_text) (green_text)

./some_command | awk -F' ' '{print $1}'
(red_text) # < but the color is standard terminal color, not red anymore

How to keep the original coloring in the awk output?

1 + 1

linux

shell

bash

awk

HBruijn

7/23/24, 12:36 PM

*"The reason is not that awk strips colours but rather that "well-designed" programs that produce coloured 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 colour-changing escape sequences."* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/185611/48232 - so you may need to force the original program to generate coloured output.

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Arkadiusz Drabczyk

7/22/24, 7:15 PM

some_command may have an option to force color even when it's connected to a terminal, for example with grep it would be --color=always. If it doesn't though you have to trick some_command into thinking it's connected to a terminal. Using script for example:

script --return --quiet -c 'echo a b | grep --color a'   /dev/null | awk '{print $1}'

There would be no color if you ran grep without script:

echo a b | grep --color a  | awk '{print $1}'

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