[m463]

It does complicated matters if you're capturing command output in logfiles or an editor.

In my scripts, I just check for unset term and/or use tput to get the sequences (which honors TERM=dumb)

one example:

  col_ok=`tput bold; tput setaf 7; tput setab 2`
  col_fail=`tput bold; tput setaf 7; tput setab 1`
  col_end=`tput sgr0`

  echo "${col_fail} ERROR: it failed ${col_end}"

so running the script gives me colorized output (xterm-256color), but running it like this:

  TERM=dumb <script>

gives plain text