I am writing a small script for watchr that runs my PHP unit tests.

Current script runs tests using system() and displays them colored.

I am trying to add libnotify functionality, but for that I need to parse the output and match against regexp, so that notification will either display green or red.

system() doesn't return output, %x does return, but puts p doesn't display colors, which I need to quickly see which test failed. One option would be to run tests twice - once for display in terminal window, and second time for checking which notification to show, but I would rather avoid it.