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When I used Ubuntu, I remember that the output of make/gcc/g++ had nice colors, which were particularly helpful when needing to quickly identify errors (they were red).

Is there a way to enable colors for make et. al. on OS X as well?

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Are you using bash or another shell like zsh? Either way, you'll want to set up the variables CLICOLOR and LSCOLORS for your shell and see of the tools are compiled for colors or you need to homebrew them... – bmike♦ Sep 6 '12 at 21:36
@bmike: I'm using the default shell/Terminal that came with the OS, so bash. Also, I already tried that (raw.github.com/gist/3660552/…), but the output is not colored... Does that mean I can't have color unless I install my own compilation suite (which seems painful)? – houbysoft Sep 6 '12 at 21:39
Probably - you can check the version of the source Apple built for make at opensource.apple.com - hopefully there is a nice readme that will tell you what compiler flags are needed to recompile things if it doesn't respect an environment variable like other tools. – bmike♦ Sep 7 '12 at 2:56

1 Answer

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make on OS X does not appear to support color out-of-the-box, and recompiling is painful.

However, I found this make wrapper which does the job.

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