color

A small Unix CLI tool that colorizes text from standard input using ANSI terminal escape sequences.

It is designed for use in pipes and shell scripts: color writes the requested ANSI escape sequence to stdout, passes the incoming byte stream through, and resets the terminal color afterwards.

Usage

color [-b] [-i] [-f] <color>

Options

Option	Description
-b	Bold output
-i	High-intensity output
-f	Force color output even when stdout is not a TTY (e.g. when piping into a file or another program)
-bi	Bold and high-intensity output

Colors

black · red · green · yellow · blue · pink · cyan · white · reset

The special value reset emits an ANSI reset sequence to restore the terminal's default formatting.

Examples

# Red text
echo "Hello, world" | color red

# Bold green text
echo "Success" | color -b green

# High-intensity yellow text
echo "Warning" | color -i yellow

# Bold high-intensity blue text
echo "Information" | color -bi blue

# Bold high-intensity blue, forced even when piped to a file
echo "Information" | color -bif blue > output.txt

# Reset terminal formatting
color reset

Installation

Prerequisites

• GCC or any C99-compatible compiler
• GNU Make
• A terminal with ANSI color support

Build & Install

# Build
make

# Install binary, man pages and bash completion
sudo make install

This installs:

• color → /usr/local/bin/color
• Man page (English) → /usr/local/share/man/man1/color.1.gz
• Man page (German) → /usr/local/share/man/de/man1/color.1.gz
• Bash completion → /usr/local/share/bash-completion/completions/color

Uninstall

sudo make uninstall

Bash Completion

Bash completion is installed automatically via make install. After a new shell session, pressing Tab will suggest available colors and options.

If you want to install the completion script manually without installing the binary:

sudo make install_autocomplete

Man Page

After installation, the man page is available in English and German:

man color       # English
man -L de color # German

Notes

• By default, color escape sequences are only written when stdout is a TTY. Use -f to force color output even when piping to a file or another program.
• The tool reads from stdin in blocks and is suitable for streaming use cases.

Author

Christian Forler

Acknowledgments

This README was written by Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic.