[Ilugc] using cat to print in a color scheme
- From: steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx (steve)
- Date: Tue Feb 17 02:57:05 2009
Hi Satish,
Satish Eerpini wrote:
Is it possible to 'cat' a file to the terminal in a particular color
scheme, say like the color scheme used by vim or something.
I mean instead of getting plain text when we run say :
cat foo.c
, can we obtain the output in a particular color scheme in the
terminal ? Is this possible ??
Well, "cat" a tool for concatenating files. It does not know (or care) where it
is cat-ing to (for that matter, it does not know or care, where it is cat-ing
from either -- and still, or probably because of this, it is one of the most
useful commands in the unix toolbox)
OTOH, Pagers (like 'more' or 'less') are tools to view files on the terminal.
That said, vim also behaves somewhat like a pager when invoked using the
command
'view'. However, this does not do syntax highlighting, nor does it take input
from stdin (ie: executing "cat /some/file | view" does not do what you expect)
So, to view a file with syntax highlighting, you can use a vim trick.
- Look for the file /usr/share/vim/vim*/macros/less.sh
- create an alias for that script:
$ alias vless='/usr/share/vim/vim<version>/macros/less.sh'
(you may also save the alias in ~/.bashrc if you like)
- now use vless as you would use less
$ vless foo.c
$ cat /some/file | some_filter | vless
HTH
regards,
- steve
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