Can colorized output be captured via shell redirect? [duplicate]

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).

Redirecting doesn't strip colors, but many commands will detect when they are sending output to a terminal, and will not produce colors by default if not. For example, on Linux ls --color=auto (which is aliased to plain ls in a lot of places) will not produce color codes if outputting to a pipe or file, but ls --color will. Many other tools have similar override flags to get them to save colorized output to a file, but it's all specific to the individual tool.

Even once you have the color codes in a file, to see them you need to use a tool that leaves them intact. less has a -r flag to show file data in "raw" mode; this displays color codes. edit: Slightly newer versions also have a -R flag which is specifically aware of color codes and displays them properly, with better support for things like line wrapping/trimming than raw mode because less can tell which things are control codes and which are actually characters going to the screen.

Inspired by the other answers, I started using script. I had to use -c to get it working though. All other answers, including tee, different script examples did not work for me.

Context:

• Ubuntu 16.04
• running behavior tests with behave and starting shell command during the test with python's subprocess.check_call()

Solution:

script --flush --quiet --return /tmp/ansible-output.txt --command "my-ansible-command"

Explanation for the switches:

• --flush was needed, because otherwise the output is not well live-observable, coming in big chunks
• --quiet supresses the own output of the script tool
• -c, --command directly provides the command to execute, piping from my command to script did not work for me (no colors)
• --return to make script propagate the exit code of my command so I know if my command has failed