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0 pointsMereInterest4y ago0 comments

My preference would be to leave them in if they're the default, but to have an option to switch entirely to a more machine-readable format. It's a single line of sed to strip them out[0], and it's a bigger pain to figure out why a program has different behavior when debugging.

[0] https://superuser.com/a/380778

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2 comments · 1 top-level

kbrazil4y ago· 1 in thread

I typically run the command output through `cat` to see if it does different things when outputting to the terminal vs piping.

The biggest changes are typically ANSI color codes and column length. Some programs do strange things, like changing how they escape characters (ls).

JC turns off ANSI color codes when it’s output is not a terminal, but that’s it.

laumars4y ago

Changes in column length isn’t something that can’t be helped. The issue is that when a command outputs to a TTY, you can use that file descriptor to get the width of the TTY (ie your terminal emulator). But if you are piping a command then it’s STDOUT is no longer a TTY and thus you have no idea how wide the terminal is.

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