Term::ANSIColor version 0.09 (A simple ANSI text attribute control module) Copyright 1996, 1997 Russ Allbery and Zenin . All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. INTRODUCTION This module grew out of a thread on comp.lang.perl.misc where several of us were throwing around different ways to print colored text from Perl scripts and Zenin posted his old library to do that. I (Russ) disagreed with the implementation and offered my own (the color() and colored() functions implemented in this package), Zenin convinced me that the constants had their place as well, and we started figuring out the best ways of implementing both. While ANSI color escape codes are fairly simple, it can be hard to remember the codes for all of the attributes and the code resulting from hard-coding them into your script is definitely difficult to read. This module is designed to fix those problems, as well as provide a convenient interface to do a few things for you automatically (like resetting attributes after the text you print out so that you don't accidentally leave attributes set). Despite its name, this module can also handle non-color ANSI text attributes (bold, underline, reverse video, and blink). It uses either of two interfaces, one of which uses "constants" for each different attribute and the other of which uses two subs which take strings of attributes as arguments. See the POD documentation for complete details, features, and usage. INSTALLATION Follow the standard installation procedure for Perl modules, which is to type the following commands: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install You'll probably need to do the last as root. If instead you wish to install the module by hand, simply copy it into a directory named Term in your Perl library directory. THANKS To Jon Lennox for looking at early versions of this module, providing feedback, and offering suggestions for improvement. To Jesse Taylor for writing the first significant script to use this module (colorized calsplit), thus offering innumerable opportunities to test and debug. To Larry Wall, as always, for Perl. Russ Allbery rra@cs.stanford.edu