[pacman-dev] coloured pacman

[Jürgen Hötzel]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 03:11:06PM -0500, Dan McGee wrote:
> On 2/6/07, Jürgen Hötzel <juergen at 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
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