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I got this in a file:

\033[31mException log

And when I do:

less -R demo

I get no colors:

enter image description here

What am I doing wrong?

Jeff Schaller
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Gabriel
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    Note that an actual escape character (U+1B) would be represented as ESC in inverse colors, if you ran less demo, without -R. – wjandrea Jan 20 '19 at 02:33

3 Answers3

7

You need to put the actual escape code in the file. One way to do this would be:

echo -e "\033[31mException log\033[0m" > file.txt

Then less -R file.txt should be able to interpret the color code.

Community
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user1794469
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  • Some other ways to generate these control sequences are at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/491863/ . – JdeBP Jan 20 '19 at 10:31
1

These characters are not a colour code sequence, but they are the sequence to tell some tools/programming-languages to create the desired character sequence.

e.g.

echo -e "\033[31mException log"
ctrl-alt-delor
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Test that your terminal actually supports the colours by running:

cat your_file.txt

If your file has colour codes, your terminal will show them. If not, then either 1) your term isn't configured to support it or 2) you've entered incorrect codes.

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