Colors in bash after piping through less?

Question

When I have dircolors defined life is full of... color.

When I pipe ls through less to scroll around I lose the colors.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Most likely your ls is aliased to ls --color=auto, which tells ls to only use colors when its output is a tty. If you do ls --color (which is morally equivalent to ls --color=always), that will force it to turn on colors.

You could also change your alias to do that, but I wouldn't really call that a good idea. Better to make a different alias with --color.

less needs -R too, which causes it to output the raw control characters.

Answer 2

Try less with the -R option like this:

command | less -R

This works for me in a one-liner like this:

ls -la | grep --color=always bash | less -r

And like this too:

ls --color | less -R

But you have to tweak the primary output (the output of ls in this case) a bit with the --color parameter.