Coloring output of forked processes

Question

I have a runscript that starts some processes and sends them to the background

mongod       & pid_mongo=$!
redis-server & pid_redis=$!
# etc.

All these processes then output concurrently to the same standard output. My question: is it possible to color the output of each different forked process, so that - for example - one of them outputs in green and the other one in red ?

Answer 1

red=$(tput setaf 1)
green=$(tput setaf 2)
default=$(tput sgr0)
cmd1 2>&1 | sed "s/.*/$red&$default/" &
cmd2 2>&1 | sed "s/.*/$green&$default/" &

Answer 2

You could do this by piping through a filter, it is just a matter of adding appropriate ANSI codes before and after each line:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_sequences#Colors

I could not find a tool which actually does this after a few minutes googling, which is bit odd considering how easy it would be to write one.

Here's an idea using C:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>

/* std=gnu99 required */

// ANSI reset sequence
#define RESET "\033[0m\n"
// length of RESET
#define RLEN 5
// size for read buffer
#define BUFSZ 16384
// max length of start sequence
#define START_MAX 12

void usage (const char *name) {
    printf("Usage: %s [-1 N -2 N -b -e | -h]\n", name);
    puts("-1 is the foreground color, -2 is the background.\n"
        "'N' is one of the numbers below, corresponding to a color\n"
        "(if your terminal is not using the standard palette, these may be different):\n"
        "\t0 black\n"
        "\t1 red\n"
        "\t2 green\n"
        "\t3 yellow\n"
        "\t4 blue\n"
        "\t5 magenta\n"
        "\t6 cyan\n"
        "\t7 white\n"
        "-b sets the foreground to be brighter/bolder.\n"
        "-e will print to standard error instead of standard out.\n"
        "-h will print this message.\n"
    );
    exit (1);
}


// adds character in place and increments pointer
void appendChar (char **end, char c) {
    *(*end) = c;
    (*end)++;
}


int main (int argc, char *const argv[]) {
// no point in no arguments...
    if (argc < 2) usage(argv[0]);

// process options
    const char options[]="1:2:beh";
    int opt,
        set = 0,
        output = STDOUT_FILENO;
    char line[BUFSZ] = "\033[", // ANSI escape
        *p = &line[2];

    // loop thru options
    while ((opt = getopt(argc, argv, options)) > 0) {
        if (p - line > START_MAX) usage(argv[0]);
        switch (opt) {
            case '?': usage(argv[0]);
            case '1': // foreground color
                if (
                    optarg[1] != '\0'
                    || optarg[0] < '0'
                    || optarg[0] > '7'
                ) usage(argv[0]);
                if (set) appendChar(&p, ';');
                appendChar(&p, '3');
                appendChar(&p, optarg[0]);
                set = 1;
                break;
            case '2': // background color
                if (
                    optarg[1] != '\0'
                    || optarg[0] < '0'
                    || optarg[0] > '7'
                ) usage(argv[0]);
                if (set) appendChar(&p, ';');
                appendChar(&p, '4');
                appendChar(&p, optarg[0]);
                set = 1;
                break;
            case 'b': // set bright/bold
                if (set) appendChar(&p, ';');
                appendChar(&p, '1');
                set = 1;
                break;
            case 'e': // use stderr
                output = STDERR_FILENO;
                break;
            case 'h': usage(argv[0]);
            default: usage(argv[0]);
        }
    }
    // finish 'start' sequence
    appendChar(&p, 'm');

// main loop

    // set non-block on input descriptor
    int flags = fcntl(STDIN_FILENO, F_GETFL, 0);
    fcntl(STDIN_FILENO, F_SETFL, flags | O_NONBLOCK);

    // len of start sequence
    const size_t slen = p - line,
    // max length of data to read
        rmax = BUFSZ - (slen + RLEN);
    // actual amount of data read
    ssize_t r;
    // index of current position in output line
    size_t cur = slen;
    // read buffer
    char buffer[rmax];
    while ((r = read(STDIN_FILENO, buffer, rmax))) {
        if (!r) break;  // EOF
        if (r < 1) {
            if (errno == EAGAIN) continue;
            break;  // done, error
        }
        // loop thru input chunk byte by byte
        // this is all fine for utf-8
        for (int i = 0; i < r; i++) {
            if (buffer[i] == '\n' || cur == rmax) {
            // append reset sequence
                for (int j = 0; j < RLEN; j++) line[j+cur] = RESET[j];
            // write out start sequence + buffer + reset
                write(output, line, cur+RLEN);
                cur = slen;
            } else line[cur++] = buffer[i];
        }
    }
    // write out any buffered data
    if (cur > slen) {
        for (int j = 0; j < RLEN; j++) line[j+cur] = RESET[j];
        write(output, line, cur+RLEN);
    }
    // flush
    fsync(output);

// the end
    return r;
}                                       

I think that is about as efficient as you are going to get. The write() needs to do an entire line with the ANSI sequences all in one go -- testing this with parallel forks led to interleaving if the ANSI sequences and the buffer content were done separately.

That needs to be compiled -std=gnu99 since getopt is not part of the C99 standard but it is part of GNU. I tested this somewhat with parallel forks; that source, a makefile, and the tests are in a tarball here:

http://cognitivedissonance.ca/cogware/utf8_colorize/utf8_colorize.tar.bz2

If the application you use this with logs to standard error, remember to redirect that too:

application 2>&1 | utf8-colorize -1 2 &

The .sh files in the test directory contain some usage examples.

Answer 3

another option you can use with sh built in function: works also on ash (busybox) ;)

RED=`echo -e '\033[0;31m'`
NC=`echo -e '\033[0m'` # No Color

cmdx 2>&1 | sed "s/.*/$RED&$NC/" &

I wrote myself a shell function to easily run programs in the background. This is writen for busybox' ash! Works in bash as well. Just run:

bg_red <whatever cmd you want to run in the bg>

put following into your .bashrc

ESC="\033"                                                                      
# Colors:
COLOR_RED_F="${ESC}[31m"
COLOR_GREEN_F="${ESC}[32m" 
COLOR_RESET="${ESC}[0m" 

bg_red()            
{                                                                               
   [ "$#" -lt "1" ] && echo "bg_red() <cmd to run in bg>" && return 1           
   PIPE_RED=`echo -e $COLOR_RED_F`                                              
   PIPE_NC=`echo -e $COLOR_RESET`                                               
   $@ 2>&1 | sed "s/.*/$PIPE_RED&$PIPE_NC/" &                                   
}                                  

as seen here: http://www.bramschoenmakers.nl/en/node/511.html

Answer 4

You are probably better of redirecting the logs to specific output files?

There are many different solutions for colorizing output. The easiest probably would be to use the grc package..