5 ms·

My guess is the ansi color escape codes mess with peoples parsing code of the output when scripting.

• wruza 8y ago
  All sane tools check if output isatty(3) before doing that.
  • abstractbeliefs 8y ago
    Many don't though. Typically, though, the place to add no-color is even on the same line as this test and is a very cheap add, so anyone looking to add it would do well to consider adding both.
    • wruza 8y ago
      Many who? Did I miss the arrival of new “Move Fast Etc” era into unix cli?
      • abstractbeliefs 8y ago
        There's a bunch even on that list. I had a look at ffind, the second on the page and found nothing to test if the output was tty or otherwise. Generally though, I'm not out to point fingers, it's just a fact that not all software is complete and bug-free. We're all people with limited time and we don't have the attention to detail that dealing with the maliciously compliant children that computers are takes.
  • masukomi 8y ago
    as @abstractbeliefs said, there are a lot that don't, but personally i hate it when apps do that because it removes my ability to actually maintain the colors through pipe chains. It's much harder to convince an app to maintain color through a pipe from an app that does this than it is to remove color from an app that doesn't pay attention to tty or not.