Consider enabling --color by default

[Jeremy Bícha]

The output of

ip --color a

looks a lot nicer to me than

ip a

If you look in /etc/skel/.bashrc you can see that we already enable color for other commands:
 alias ls='ls --color=auto'
 alias grep='grep --color=auto'
 alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'
 alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Hi Jeremy,
the difference of this and the tools we already do so is a hard enable vs auto mode.

The cases we already have are handling --color=auto to only add color if running on a terminal.
Instead the --color of ip is a hard enable.

So if you e.g. do:
$ ip --color a > /tmp/foo

Or if we would set up an alias
$ ip a > /tmp/foo

Then the file would contain control chars which no on wants (and could break parsing/monitoring).
I checked latest upstream git of iproute and it still is that way.

So I'd assume the best would be to file a bug upstream and link it here - what do you think Jeremy?

[David Britton (dpb)]

Adding -colorauto patch to ip. It allows the behavior requested. Tested build and install on bionic. Will in parallel work on sending the patch upstream.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

Bump; was this patch sent upstream? What is the status of it at the moment?

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