The 2026 Drupal Business Survey is open. Your response will help shape the future of the Drupal business ecosystem.We are using drush in scripts and don't want it to use color characters in our logfiles. I am aware of the --nocolor argument, but IMHO it makes sense to check whether stdout is a terminal, and if not, make this option default.
This is a trivial patch to drush shell script which does this:
35a36,40
> # prepend "--nocolor" to the argument list if stdout is not a terminal
> if [ ! -t 1 ]; then
> set -- "--nocolor" ${1+"$@"}
> fi
>
What do you think?
Comments
Comment #1
moshe weitzman commentedSeems reasonable. Would be good to get Owen's input.
Comment #2
moshe weitzman commentedOr anyone's input. I'm not much of a bash wiz.
Comment #3
greg.1.anderson commented-t checks to see if the file descriptor is set and is a terminal, and of course fd 1 is stdout. The 'set' line is a bit obtuse, but since it is brief, I left it as written.
Works perfectly; committed.
Comment #4
patrick2000 commented@dbt
Sorry, dbt, I am not really in any position to make smart comments here on how you should write your scripts, but I will, nevertheless, do it.
As drush is intended to be used either interactively from the command line OR automatically, by scripts, I think the [ ! -t 1 ] test you proposed should actually be in YOUR script and not in drush.
The case of running scripts from cron is already handled by #740448: tput errors when running "drush" script in cron.
If you want to run your scripts in a terminal and still have --nocolors (probably because you are piping the output to tee /var/log/xyz.log) or something like that, I think it would be your script that should call drush with the "--nocolor" argument in that case and not drush changing its own arguments. That somehow doesn't make sense to me, since it makes drush less flexible.
You've asked - that's what I think.
... any arguments supporting the decision to put the test in drush?
Otherwise, please consider the patch in http://drupal.org/node/740448#comment-3451054
Comment #5
greg.1.anderson commentedShould this patch be backed out?
As was pointed out in #740448: tput errors when running "drush" script in cron,
drush ... | lesswill be devoid of color if this patch stands. To me, this is not a big deal, and the -t test above will help more often than it hurts, as you only very rarely want color when stdout is not a terminal. Still, there is no --color flag, and as #4 above points out, we could just insist that people who care put in the --nocolor flag.I'm ambivalent.
Comment #6
greg.1.anderson commented#4 won out; the currently committed code does not include this patch. Specify --nocolor if you do not want drush to include color in the output.