A quick survey of HPUX, AIX, and Solaris show they all support it; it has probably been around for quite some time. I don't have my 4.2BSD manuals handy at the moment but I'd bet it was supported there too.The terminal escape sequences from 'make test >&outfile' can be a bit annoying. It's not hard to say 'TERM=dumb make test >&outfile', but I forget it now and then.
I'd like to wrap the code to find terminal escape sequences in configure and 'make test' in 'if test -t 1', which checks if file descriptor 1 goes to a terminal.
However, I'm unsure how portable 'test -t' is. 'test -t 1 2>/dev/null' would be safe, but then only systems that support 'test -t' get escape sequences. Comments?
-- -- Howard Chu Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc OpenLDAP Core Team http://www.openldap.org/project/