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I'm on OS X, which has a BSD version of sed (which I'm guessing is inferior to a GNU version on Linux), and all the techniques for removing color on commandlinefu.com did not work. I tried replacing the -r switch (non-existent on OS X) with -e, but that didn't help.

Is there some reliable way I can remove color formatting codes on OS X? Here's the command I'm running that needs color output stripped:

for concurrency in $(seq 1 50); do siege -f urls.txt -c $concurrency -t 5m >> results.csv ; done

and here's an example of trying to use sed to strip the color from the CSV output:

for concurrency in $(seq 1 50); do siege -f urls.txt -c $concurrency -t 5m | sed "s,\x1B\[[0-9;]*[a-zA-Z],,g" >> results.csv ; done
iconoclast
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1 Answers1

16

With bash, this ought to pass sed appropriate arguments, I think:

sed $'s,\x1b\\[[0-9;]*[a-zA-Z],,g'

Or, more portably to other shells, you could try:

sed "s,$(printf '\033')\\[[0-9;]*[a-zA-Z],,g"

Or just putting an escape byte directly into the string by typing Ctrl-vEsc instead of typing \x1b.

Note, though, that this sed statement removes more than just color codes, potentially - it could match many control sequences starting with a CSI. Search in page for "CSI" in this to get an idea of what other control sequences it would remove (or possibly mangle).

godlygeek
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    The bash version worked without any adjustment needed: you deserve more upvotes than all the people on commandlinefu.com! – iconoclast Jul 02 '14 at 17:54