I just discovered this very cool tip. If you want a colored man pages, adding the following to your environment does it:

` export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$’\E[01;31m’ export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$’\E[01;31m’ export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$’\E[0m’ export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$’\E[0m’ export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$’\E[01;44;33m’ export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$’\E[0m’ export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$’\E[01;32m’ `

I found the tip while searching for a way to preserve the colored output of grep after it has been piped into less. ‘less -r’ preserves the terminal escape sequences from the input. The following will get preserve the colors:

` grep –color=always | less -r `