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Bryan Agee
Asked: 2012-02-15 15:58:57 +0800 CST

Is it possible to color-code the output of apt?

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With the plethora of possibilities for most command-line tools, I would be surprised to learn that there is no way to colorize the info that apt-get, apt-cache, and related tools return. Even so, Googling was fruitless in this.

Primarily, it would be nice to have the summary lines that show total count/size, and color-code each type of action count: eg, upgrades in blue, installs in green, held in yellow, and removed in red.

command-line colors apt

3 Answers

  1. Sure, it's easy. There are even tools for it. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/981601/colorized-grep-viewing-the-entire-file-with-highlighting

    I prefer rcg (Regex Colored Glasses).

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  2. As weird as it may sound: NO. While the excellent Arch Linux's pacman has built-in colorizing capabilities (and a few more available via 3rd-party wrappers) there's nothing similar for the aging apt/dpkg combo nor the relatively newer aptitude tool.

    This is how pacman looks like using an external wrapper (mostly Yaourt or Packer, can't remember which one I was using at the time): http://i.imgur.com/ABk0u.png

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  3. This is the closest you can get: How do I enable fancy apt colours and progress bars?

    For the rest you can use sed/awk and terminal color codes.

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