How to detect color of text on the command line through a script?

Question

I have a command-line program that outputs some text in different colors depending on the status. The text doesnt change on multiple calls, but its color changes.

Eg:The program outputs the text "S14789" on the console. The color of this text will be in red if the status is fail, and green if pass

I need to write a script to do some thing else depending on the color (status). Any suggestions?

Answer 1

As the scripts are giving one value at one time you can modify the script to change the exit values to 0 if it is pass and 1 if it is pass.

#!/bin/bash

echo "Print in green"
exit 0

$ ./script1.sh
Print in green
$ echo $?
0

The same way you can use exit 1 which return a value 1 to ? variable and you can use it to determine whether the script pass or fail.

Answer 2

So, here is what I did to perform tasks depending on color output:

/usr/bin/smoke is my program which outputs text in a particular color. Search for the color escape sequence and perform tasks (Thanks to @Jidder for suggesting cat -v ).

#!/bin/bash

COUNT=`/usr/bin/smoke | cat -v | fgrep "^[[32" | wc -l`
if [ $COUNT -gt 0 ] 
then
    #Color found, do something
else
    #Color not found, do something else
fi

Note: 32 is for green. For other colors refer the list of escape sequences: http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/terminalcodes#general_useful_ascii_codes