www.developer.com/open/article.php/631241
January 24, 2001 If you've just begun programming on the Linux console, you may find yourself less than enthused about the available color choices (or lack thereof). Indeed, the default -- dreary gray on black -- brings to mind Henry Ford's famous statement regarding color schemes for his Model T: "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." You may have noticed that the "ls" command is capable of producing a rainbow of colors; executables are typically green, compressed files are red, and graphics (.GIF, .JPG, etc.) are purple. But are these special hues limited to file listings? If not, how can you apply the day-glo treatment to your own code? The answer is surprisingly simple: all you need are some console escape sequences. Try typing the following at your command prompt:
This is made possible by \033 , the standard console "escape" code, which is equivalent to ^[ , or 0x1B in hex. When this character is received, the Linux console treats the subsequent characters as a series of commands. These commands can do any number of neat tricks, including changing text colors. Here's the actual syntax:
Anything following the trailing "m" is considered to be text. It doesn't matter if you leave a space behind the "m" or not. So this is how you turn your text to a deep forest green:
Programming Console ColorsOf course, escape sequences aren't limited to shell scripts and functions. Let's see how the same result can be achieved with C and Perl:
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