Question

Various bash commands I use — fancy diffs, build scripts, etc, produce lots of color output.

When I redirect this output to a file, and then cat or less the file later, the colorization is gone — presumably b/c the act of redirecting the output stripped out the color codes that tell the terminal to change colors.

Is there a way to capture colorized output, including the colorization?

Answer 1

One way to capture colorized output is with the script command. Running script will start a bash session where all of the raw output is captured to a file (named typescript by default).