The colors in Rails log files are helpful when watching them but, since they are ANSI color codes like ^[[4;36;1m, can be annoying when you are reading the logs with a tool that does just prints those control characters (like less or vim).
Remove them with sed:
cat staging.log | sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,3}((;[0-9]{1,3})*)?)?[m|K]//g"
This will print the log without colors to your terminal. You can pipe the result into less for example.
To have a file you can vim around with, just write that output into a new file:
cat staging.log | sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,3}((;[0-9]{1,3})*)?)?[m|K]//g" > staging.colorless.log
Posted by Arne Hartherz to makandra dev (2011-09-30 14:23)