Display file with ANSI colors
I was looking for a solution to this exact bash question. I nearly missed @Thomas Dickey's comment which provided me with the most elegant solution.
echo -e $(cat test.txt)
Some things which did not work for me are(apparently you cant pipe things to echo)
cat test.txt | echo -e
or
less -R test.txt
Another issue I had was that echo -e didn't print newlines and contiguous whitespaces within the file nicely. To print those, I used the following.
echo -ne $(cat test.txt | sed 's/$/\\n/' | sed 's/ /\\a /g')
This works for a test.txt file containing
\e[0;31mExa mple\e[0m
\e[0;31mExample line2\e[0m