tty handling

Most utilities detect if the standard output is a tty and don't output control characters (ANSI or other like termcap) when it's not a tty device.

I appreciate that there are command line arguments to toggle outputting ANSI codes (-c).
It provides flexibility, but by default it is expected from utilities to emit control characters only on tty capable outputs.

So the issue is that exifprobe defaults to always output ANSI control codes irrespectively of the presence of a tty.

Thank you

[hfiguiere]

It works fine here.

Please check again. ANSI chars are always sent, whatever the output device.

Example with redirecting to a file. One can clearly see the escape sequences "ESC[30m" and "ESC[0m":

user@silver:~$ exifprobe Image001.jpg > some_file
user@silver:~$ less -X some_file 
ESC[30mFile Name = Image001.jpg
File Type = JPEG
File Size = 15778
ESC[30m@000000000=0       :  <JPEG_SOI>
@0x0000002=2       :    <JPEG_APP0> 0xffe0 length 16, 'JFIF'
@0x000000b=11      :      Version       = 1.1
@0x000000d=13      :      Units         = 'aspect ratio'
@0x000000e=14      :      Xdensity      = 1
@0x0000010=16      :      Ydensity      = 1
@0x0000012=18      :      XThumbnail    = 0
@0x0000013=19      :      YThumbnail    = 0
@0x0000013=19      :    </JPEG_APP0>
@0x0000014=20      :    <JPEG_DQT> length 132
@0x000009a=154     :    <JPEG_SOF_0> length 17, 8 bits/sample, components=3, width=352, height=288
@0x00000ad=173     :    <JPEG_DHT> length 418 table class = 0 table id = 0
@0x0000251=593     :    <JPEG_SOS> length 12  start of JPEG data, 3 components 101376 pixels
@0x0003da0=15776   :  <JPEG_EOI> JPEG length 15778
ESC[0mESC[30m-0x0003da1=15777   :  END OF FILE
ESC[90m@000000000=0       :  Start of JPEG baseline DCT compressed primary image [352x288] length 15778 (APP0)
-0x0003da1=15777   :    End of JPEG primary image data
ESC[0mESC[30mNumber of images = 1
File Format = JPEG/APP0/JFIF

For comparison, a plain file don't have any:

user@silver:~$ cat > some_plain_file
this is
a
plain
file
user@silver:~$ less -X some_plain_file 
this is
a
plain
file

[hfiguiere]

Problem was on this side, I had mistakenly disabled the colour output. I can reproduce now.

[hfiguiere]

The behaviour is that you have to pass -t in EXIFPROBE_OPTIONS to explicitly disable colour by default. See in the file CHANGES_2.0.

Not sure if that's the best solution though.

Not sure if that's the best solution though.

I couldn't agree more. In addition to be not practical, the environment is not always under control. For example when invoked through other programs like automation, frameworks, scripts and cron jobs.

[hfiguiere]

and I strongly discourage using that software on a production server with random data. It's security quality is unknown (probably bad).