Lately there has been a tendency by command line tools to use fancy ANSI colors in their log output (for example, NPM and a host of nodejs based tools, rvm, docker, and a few other "modern" tools).
This makes it nice to read on the screen(*), but not so nice when you want to pipe the output to a log file or through a transport that does not handle ANSI well, like various remote execution tools and web based monitoring solutions. A lot of more mature tools at least had the decency to detect when the output is not a TTY and disable color, but not with those new fangled "user friendly" CLIs - which leaves me the try to get rid of the ANSI colors by piping the output through yet another process.
Sed-ing the output through s/\x1B\[[0-9]*\w//g
seems to get the job done, but is there a cleaner approach then just copy pasting regular expressions into all of my scripts?
(*) at least until the the tool tries to display errors in dark red on your dark background terminal.