Add --color to all Unix commands

Question

Is it possible to "alias" all commands to append --color? Or instead have it automatically activated for every program that supports it?

Answer 1

How would the shell know automatically which programs support the --color option? You'd have to give it a list, and as long as you're going to do that you might as well just give it a list of alias commands to run. I suppose it could be done programmatically by something like this (in bash):

for cmd in ls blah foo; do
    alias "$cmd=$cmd --color"
done

Answer 2

There are really very few programs that support the --color option, and they aren't actually written by a single organization. Thus, they don't refer to a central location for their options. Heck, the don't even have a uniform argument set, so just the --color option to the end of every command would probably cause a lot of damage!

I'm afraid you'd have to alias each and one. For example, for ls:

alias ls='ls --color'

Answer 3

You should be careful with this, especially when chaining invocations.

grep --color=yes 'foo' bar.txt | less   #leads to weird ANSI stuff in output
grep --color=yes 'foo' bar.txt | less -R #binary codes interpreted as colors

Basically, this can screw up pipelining...I'd recommend aliasing things with colorized output to separate commands to avoid doing "cmd | myprog" and getting weird results due to embedded ANSI.

Answer 4

instead of trying to change each command

why not just change the way your console displays colors

Answer 5

See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/563500/what-unix-commands-support-coloured-output