acoc - arbitrary command output colourer
acoc
is a regular expression based colour formatter for programs
that display output on the command-line.
It works as a wrapper around the target program, executing it and capturing the stdout stream. Optionally, stderr can be redirected to stdout, so that it, too, can be manipulated.
acoc
then applies matching rules to patterns in the output
and applies colour sets to those matches.
Usage
Just call the command you want to color after acoc
.
Arguments are passed normally:
acoc command [arg1 .. argN]
acoc
supports the following command-line options:
Option | Description |
---|---|
-h or --help |
Display usage information. |
-v or --version |
Display version information. |
Installation
Installing as a RubyGem should solve all dependencies:
$ gem install acoc
acoc
can also make use of
Masahiro Tomita's Ruby/TPty
library to allocate pseudo-terminals in order to fool those
programs that behave differently if their stdout stream is not
connected to a tty.
ls
is one such program.
Whilst Ruby/TPty is not mandatory (acoc
will ignore its absence),
it's installation is recommended in order to improve the
transparency of acoc
's operation.
Configuration
Files
By reading the regular expressions on the configuration file,
acoc
decides how to color the output. Here's the order of
reading:
/usr/local/etc/acoc.conf
/etc/acoc.conf
~/.acoc.conf
NOTE: When you run acoc
for the first time, it places an
example file on your home directory. Instructions on how to
customize and add your commands are included there.
Environment Variables
acoc
also responds to environment variables. You'd normally
use them like this:
$ export VAR="value"
$ acoc
If ACOC
is set to none
, no colouring will be performed.
If ACOCRC
is set, specifies the location of an additional
configuration file.
Contributing
acoc
is only as good as the configuration file that it uses.
If you compose pattern-matching rules that you think would be
useful to other people, please
send them to me for inclusion in a
subsequent release.
Bugs
- Nested regular expressions do not work well. Inner subexpressions need to use clustering (?:), not capturing (). In other words, they can be used for matching, but not for colouring.
Author
acoc
was written by Ian Macdonald [email protected]
The Ruby Gem was made by Alexandre Dantas [email protected]
License
Copyright (C) 2003-2004 Ian Macdonald
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.