USING COLORS WITH ls

Color-coding output is a useful way to brighten a dreary terminal screen and to quickly identify file types at a glance. Some UNIX variants (such as OpenBSD or FreeBSD) and Linux variants don't use color-coded output for ls by default. However, many do.

Knowing how to accomplish the following will allow you to customize your color-coding with ls. The first thing you need to do is set up an alias for ls telling it to use colors. You can do this in ~/.bash_profile or /etc/profile if you use the bash shell in the following way:

eval `dircolors --sh /etc/DIR_COLORS`alias ls="ls --color=auto"

This is assuming a change to /etc/profile for system-wide color support.

The dircolors command will read the file /etc/DIR_COLORS to obtain the codes for different file entries. An example /etc/DIR_COLORS file might look like this:

COLOR tty

TERM linux

NORMAL 00

DIR 01;34

EXEC 01;32

.rpm 01;31

This simple example tells the shell:

To colorize output to ttys (terminals).

To colorize the Linux TERM type. (You can have as many TERM entries as you like.)

Not to colorize normal files.

To make directories a bold blue.

To make executable files a bold green.

To make all files ending in ".rpm" a bold red.