Please pardon me if this is the wrong forum. It seems like a simple, fundamental issue - the type which often confuse me.

I am playing with a security scanner called lynis which produces a very nicely formatted and color coded output when I run it at the command line. I now have a LOT of work to do to harden my computer. That said, I would like to get this output into some sort of editor with which I could print it or mark it up as I fix various issues. I can redirect > or tee the output of a lynis scan to a file. So far, so good.

If I cat the file it displays the color coding in the terminal. However, if I open it in a GUI text editor or Libre Office writer I see some gibberish representing the color coding but no color.

lynis may provide some reporting tools. I will look into that. Stil, when I capture std out with color coding from lynis or any other source I would like to have a way to make use of it. Any suggestions?

TIA,

Ken

The escape sequences you see is what allows there to be colour in the terminal. Commands like cat and less can continue to show the characters in the deisred colour as they are also outputting
to the terminal.

Once you open the file in an editor, you are no longer at the terminal but the escape sequences which produce the colours are now visible.
As the program you open the file in is not the terminal, it would not make sense for the characters to work and you have done nothing to remove them and hence
they appear.

Your alternative would be to tell Lynis to do one verion in colour so you can admire it and a second version without colour so you can work on it in your editor

1 members found this post helpful.

The package colorized-logs provides ansi2html. So you can convert the Lynis output to HTML, then open it in LibreOffice.

Another similar tool is aha.

Thanks folks,

I can simply cat the log in a terminal and scroll back and forth. Unfortunately less does not respect the color coding. I may try colorize-logs but I am not at that point yet. I started studying the lynis results at random - looking for places with a lot of red - and found that I had a boatload of old kernels still installed. Apparently autoremove in Ubuntu 20.04 does not correctly remove old kernels. Neither would several scripts and tools I found in my research. I finally ripped the remnants of old kernels out manually with sudo apt remove --purge (kernel).

Now I see that the vast majority of my systemd services are [UNSAFE} I think I need to beat down those concerns before I print out my results for some nighttime reading.

Ken

less does respect the color coding, just you need to switch raw mode (see man page)

Thanks pan64,

I figured I might be able to tweak less. At the moment I am overwhelmed with red

Ken