Capturing ANSI color escape codes with backticks

[Mr_Micawber]

I'm playing with a greppish directory listing script, and I want to retain the colors that my normal linux shell uses for ls. I know about Term::ANSIColor, but how do I capture the raw output from the backtick operator, including the escape codes?

[moritz]

Backticks do capture the raw output, but on most systems grep is configured to omit the ANSI color codes when it writes to a pipe (and not to a terminal) via the option --color=auto.

You check by simply writing

$ echo foo | grep foo   # output in read on my terminal
foo
$ echo foo | grep foo | cat # output in grey on my terminal
foo

Use --color=always to force color codes.

[shawnhcorey]

From the ls man page:

By default, color is not used to distinguish types of files. That is equivalent to using --color=none. Using the --color option without the optional WHEN argument is equivalent to using --color=always. With --color=auto, color codes are output only if standard output is connected to a terminal (tty). The environment variable LS_COLORS can influence the colors, and can be set easily by the dircolors command.

Have you tried the --color=always option?

[Mr_Micawber]

The --color=always option worked great. Thanks!