[SOLVED] Journalctl is not formatting correctly and is not in color.

Question

My user is a member of adm, but when I run journalctl it just prints out the "ESC[1;39m" instead of formating it in bold or red for errors.
example line:
Nov 04 12:16:24 red5 kernel: ESC[1;39mLinux version 3.6.5-1-ARCH (tobias@T-POWA-LX) (gcc version 4.7.2 (GCC) ) #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Oct 31 20:57:39 CET 2012ESC[0m
If I run it as sudo journalctl it formats everything as expected. I'm using xterm and less.
Last edited by greg5 (2012-11-06 00:39:13)

Answer 1

I figured out at least a workaround, I'm not sure if this is the best way to do things, but so far it's the only thing that's worked.
Here's my pager and less environment variables from .bashrc:
export LESS='-j4aR'
export PAGER="less"
The option that fixed it is -R, here's what it says on the less man page:
-R or --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS
Like -r, but only ANSI "color" escape sequences are output in "raw" form. Unlike -r, the screen appearance is maintained correctly in most cases. ANSI "color" escape sequences are sequences
of the form:
ESC [ ... m
where the "..." is zero or more color specification characters For the purpose of keeping track of screen appearance, ANSI color escape sequences are assumed to not move the cursor. You can
make less think that characters other than "m" can end ANSI color escape sequences by setting the environment variable LESSANSIENDCHARS to the list of characters which can end a color escape
sequence. And you can make less think that characters other than the standard ones may appear between the ESC and the m by setting the environment variable LESSANSIMIDCHARS to the list of
characters which can appear.
I'm still not sure why I need to do this on my desktop and not on any other machines.