bash command preserve color when piping [duplicate]

Answer 1

Most commands that do print out those color codes explicitly check if stdout/stderr is a tty (using the isatty function).

If you want to preserve the color codes, you can run it within a terminal emulator like screen or the direct logger script, saving the output to a file.

Answer 2

Here's a script snippet using the colorized output of ls as an example (on Mac OS X 10.6).

# no colored ls output if stdout is a pipe (and not a tty)
ls -G /
ls -G / | cat
script -q /dev/null ls -G / | tr -d '\r' | cat

# write output of script command to a variable
var="$(script -q /dev/null ls -G / | tr -d '\r' | cat)"
echo "$var"