Question

For example, when I’m writing program that outputs text to stdout and uses colors (via escape sequences), I would like to disable those colors if output goes to other program (like less, grep) or to file, since color codes mess up the output.

Is it possible to do it from Java process?

Answer 1

I solved it in a following way (described here):

System.console() will return Console object, if there is some terminal connected to application, and it will return null if you pipe output into other app or save it to file.

Thus it becomes a simple check:

if (System.console() == null) {
  // ... no console, print dull plaintext
} else {
  // we have a console, now we can output colors as well
}

(tested on Linux Mint 10)