Thank you! That looks very useful.

The associated program 'ansi2txt' could also solve a similar problem for me from the other way round: I tend to have grep aliased to 'grep --color=always', simply because often I'm going to pipe the results to 'less' and I still want the colors. But this sometimes trips me up if I have a series of greps: The first grep output has color codes, making the followup greps fail. If grep could be made to strip out color codes prior to running, everything would work just as expected.

In general, if you're running a series of connected commands, it's only the last one that you want to get the colors from, with the special case exception of when the last command is 'less' - in which case, the next-to-last one should keep the colors. All ways that make this happen automatically are useful!