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From: | Matthew Woehlke |
Subject: | Re: Bug#396485: diff & sdiff: please allow full-color output (fwd) |
Date: | Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:11:02 -0600 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.8) Gecko/20061025 Thunderbird/1.5.0.8 Mnenhy/0.7.4.0 |
Santiago Vila wrote:
It would be great if diff and/or sdiff could show their output in color. ...you could pick the most convenient option for the most users: you could show color automatically if stdout is an interactive terminal as opposed to a pipe.
Well, I for one like this idea. Given that 'ls' and 'grep' do it, I don't think it is unprecedented.
Note some standards (based on 'ls' and 'grep') that should apply:- The option is '--color[=_when_]', where _when_ is 'yes'/'always', 'no'/'never', 'tty'/'auto', with 'auto' being default if --color is specified and 'no' otherwise. The option '--colour[=_when_]' (in grep, but not in ls) may optionally be a synonym.
- The environment variable DIFF_COLOR specifies what colors should be used.- The correct way to enable color by default is with a system-wide alias. This is a distribution decision; when coding, do not consider this.
Alternatively, if this is not suitable for 'diff' itself, it might be an excellent candidate for the currently-proposed miscutils project (see the coreutils list), since it is relatively easy to do this with the help of 'sed'.
-- Matthew"Inches: An antiquated measurement unit still in use in certain backwards countries with incredibly low-cost computer equipment."
-- groff documentation
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