On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 07:45:57 -0800, Freddy Freeloader
<fredddy@cableone.net> wrote:
I set it up as alias ls="ls -al --color=always". On one of the IT sites
I spend a fair amount of time on a *nix admin with quite a few years
experience said he has run into problems using aliases on some machines
too, so I guess it isn't unknown. I thought it was pretty strange that
it screwed things up too, but it certainly did make a difference.
Perhaps the problem is that this produces lines like:
-rw-r--r-- 1 marsh marsh 6811 Sep 27 22:50 ESC[0m.XdefaultsESC[0m
That is, it's including ASCII color codes.
This was produced with:
ls -al color=always | cat
From ls(1):
By default, color is not used to distinguish types of files. That is
equivalent to using --color=none. Using the --color option without the
optional WHEN argument is equivalent to using --color=always. With
--color=auto, color codes are output only if standard output is con-
nected to a terminal (tty).
If you change your alias to "ls -al --color=auto", you should be
golden, since ls will recognize that it's writing to a pipe, not the
terminal.