Re: Bug#396485: diff & sdiff: please allow full-color output (fwd)

[Dan Hipschman]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 01:12:26PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> You could add an option like -V, for "view color", for the feature. Or
> you could add a --color=auto switch like in ls. Or, you could pick the
> most convenient option for the most users: you could show color
> automatically if stdout is an interactive terminal as opposed to a
> pipe. (This way even people who don't know about the new option will
> automatically find out about it.)

It seems like a small perl script could accomplish the same effect more
modularly, like colorgcc does (you could probably just modify that
script).  That way you could even color the output from "cvs diff", or
"git-diff" or whatever.  For example:

$ diff foo bar | colordiff
...