Unwanted characters while redirecting output of shell commands

[jerrylewis1983]

Hello,

I am trying something like thi:
ls -1 | less

The command displays all the files but i inserts crazy looking characters as shown below:

ESC[01;34mDesktopESC[00m
ESC[00;32mdjvulibre-3.5.17-1-win32.zipESC[00m
ESC[01;34mDocumentsESC[00m
ESC[01;34mdownloadsESC[00m

I think bash is using carriage return instead of newline. But I am not sure ...
Does anyone know how to fix this ?

The problem is not seen when I use sh. Talking about sh, which file is used to store shell settings (i know bash uses .bashrc). I tried .profile and .shrc but neither of them is working.

Thanks
J

[tpl]

> ESC[01;34m...ESC[00m

looks a lot like a string used to set the prompt
PS1--I have \033[1;44m\$\033[0m

what is your PS1? (echo $PS1)

[jerrylewis1983]

(Wed Sep 12 11:39:32)~> echo $PS1
(\d \t)\w>

It contains date time and current working directory. I had changed it some time back, but the problem was present even b4 this change was made
The lines in my .bashrc doing this are:

#export PS1='$(ppwd \l)\u@\h \w> '
export PS1='(\d \t)\w> '

Thanks,
Alok

[Cabhan]

Does your regular ls output (not piping to less) appear colored and without those characters?

What I believe is the problem is that those characters are the color output of ls, and less doesn't know how to handle them. In fact, looking at the less man page mentions that -R option, which tells less to output color control characters. Do you have your "less" command aliased to "less -R"?

[jerrylewis1983]

Hmmmm that seems to be the problem. I disabled --color=always option and now things are looking fine....

Thanks Cabhan for the suggestion...