Actually the ANSI escapes span lines so newline position is really immaterial (except from a neatness point of view). In fact AFAIK they remain active until reset, and this status outlives the life of your program as you are effectively manipulating defaults on your term.

 

$ cat col.pl #!/usr/bin/perl # default black background use constant BLUE => "\e[0;34;40m"; use constant RED => "\e[0;31;40m"; use constant DEFAULT => "\e[0;37;40m"; print "The flag is: ", RED, " red ", DEFAULT, " white & ", BLUE," blue. ANSI color escapes will span", DEFAULT, " at least with putty as the terminal emulation. ", BLUE; $ ./col.pl The flag is: red white & blue. ANSI color escapes will span at least with putty as the terminal emulation. $ $ echo Oops forgot to reset blue mode Oops forgot to reset blue mode $ perl -e 'print "\e[0;37;40m"'; $ echo Fixed.... Fixed....