Forcing colors when writing to file

[rasmus-kirk]

Hi, I am using jiten as a terminal program for learning Japanese, recently I wanted to get a "word of the day" in my terminal. So I run a cron job every 10 minutes that checks if the date has changed and if it has, it updates the word. This does work as intended but I ran into issues when I wanted to also save the color to a file. I tried using both unbuffer and script to fool jiten into thinking that I was piping into an interactive shell. But this gave issues when it was run from a cron job as there is no terminal width, and jiten produced an error.

So, can I force color somehow when outputting to a file?

[obfusk]

As jiten --help will tell you, you can use --colour (before the subcommand) :)

$ jiten --colour jmdict +random

[obfusk]

jiten produced an error

That's odd. What error?

[rasmus-kirk]

Fuck, I can't believe I missed that, my bad. The errors were good, they complained that the terminal width was too low (which makes sense), since I ran this without an interactive shell and without writing directly to a file. It was just me doing it in a bad way.

Thanks for the help!