Color aliasing. Was Re: Awk and sort (of text files)

[Joe Zeff]

On 06/29/2015 12:36 PM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> The colours are defined in the LS_COLORS environment variable.  You can
> use `dircolors -p` to see what means what.  The colours are shown as
> ANSI escape sequences.  You can "see" them by printing them like this:
>
>    $ echo -e '\e[00;36mfoo\e[0m'
>
> where \e[...m wraps the escape sequence.

Yes, and I know that there is a list somewhere of the human readable 
names, or at least I know that I found one years ago.  There's no reason 
that those names can't be used, either instead of, or along with the 
escape sequences.  And, I object to the maintainers assuming that 
everybody wants color instead of making it an option.  (That is, putting 
the alias in .bashrc, possibly commented by default instead of hiding it 
in /etc/bashrc where most users would be afraid to make changes, and it 
gets overwritten with every update.)  I understand why 
developers/maintainers tend to set things up with their own personal 
preferences, but I do wish that more of them would at least try to 
resist the temptation.  I've never experimented with other shells; do 
they do the same type of thing, or is this mostly bash-specific.

(I've edited the subject line here because this fork of the thread isn't 
about awk or sort any more, but I don't want to change the threading.)