Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is a fine idea but I wonder about this part:

"... should check for the presence of a NO_COLOR environment variable that, when present (regardless of its value), prevents the addition of ANSI color ..."

How common is this behavior ?

That is, the presence of the env var regardless of its value trips the conditional ?

That seems like asking for trouble / confusion ... especially since there is a very well understood practice of setting 0/1 false/true for settings like this.

Is this commonly done and I have just never noticed it ?

I think it's fairly common.

  NO_COLOR=1
  NO_COLOR=true
  NO_COLOR=yes

Rather than parsing all the permutations, the usual evaluation of env vars that are expected to hold a boolean type is just the equivalent of:

  #ifdef NO_COLOR

Well, in ZSH [[ -v VAR ]] can actually differentiate between unset and null variables

And

NO_COLOR=

would lead to an non-intuitive behavior

I think the implication is that it should have a value.

> That is, the presence of the env var regardless of its value trips the conditional ?

Pretty normal, yeah. You can `unset FOO` a variable to set it to false.

It makes the logic simple in C (where the empty string is truthy); you can just write `if (getenv("FOO"))`.

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