On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 03:11:06PM -0500, Dan McGee wrote:
On 2/6/07, Jürgen Hötzel <juergen@hoetzel.info> wrote:
Its not easy to display colored text in a portable way. An easy, but wrong way is using ANSI escape sequences directly because you make assumption about the tty.
A much more portable way is querying the database of terminal capabilities (termcap/terminfo).
Jürgen
Much better put than my point about hardcoding the escape sequences in C code. Although not necessarily good in a bash script, the code can be edited if necessary quite easily to fix escape sequences. However, Jürgen makes the excellent point that these escape sequences cannot always be assumed to be portable.
You can also query the terminfo database in shellscripts by using ncurses tput utility. For example: $ echo `tput setf 4`RED Jürgen