preserve color-infos in a xterm-selection

tos has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi fellows,

i know, this is not a perl question, but because i'm sure that perlmonks knowledge reaches beyond the frontiers of pure perl i'll put it here.

Does anybody know how it can be done that color-informations within a text-selection in a xterm-session can be preserved. If i select f.i. the colored output of a "ls -al --color=tty" i only get the uncolored text with a CutAndPaste-action but I would like to have the text AND the color-infos in a way you can see here:

drwxrwx---+  9 tos Benutzer     0 Mar 25  2009 ESC[00;34m.ESC[00m
drwxrwx---+ 69 tos Benutzer     0 May  8  2009 ESC[00;34m..ESC[00m
-rwxr-x---+  1 tos Benutzer  2743 Oct 26  2008 ESC[00;31mAuErrorDBESC[
+00m
-rwxr-x---+  1 tos Benutzer  1736 Jan 29  2009 ESC[00;31mXcms.txtESC[0
+0m
drwxrwx---+  2 tos Benutzer     0 Jan  6  2009 ESC[00;34mxsmESC[00m
[download]

Any suggestion or hints would be appreciated.

    ~*~
    /@\
   /%;@\
  o/@,%\o
  /%;`@,\     hjw
 '^^^H^^^`
[download]

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,

tos

Is simplicity best or simply the easiest Martin L. Gore

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: preserve color-infos in a xterm-selection by Fox (Pilgrim) on Dec 18, 2009 at 09:31 UTC
`ls -al > data` like this ?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: preserve color-infos in a xterm-selection by afoken (Chancellor) on Dec 18, 2009 at 09:42 UTC
That works for the example, but it is not a generic solution to allow arbitary copies from the xterm window. It seems -- after a short Google search -- that an unmodified xterm has no way to copy color information -- at least no documented way. Alexander -- Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)	[reply]