Linux Console Colors & Other Tricks
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.
The answer is surprisingly simple: all you need are some console escape sequences.
Try typing the following at your command prompt:
What you should have is the word "Shocking" appearing in bright purple. (Sorry, electric pink is not an option). echo -e "\033[35;1m Shocking \033[0m"
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:
(In practice, you can't have any spaces between the characters; I've just inserted them here for clarity). \033 [ <command> m
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:
Note that the "-e" argument to "echo" turns on the processing of backslash-escaped characters; without this, you'd just see the full string of text in gray, command characters and all. Finally, the command "0" turns off any colors or otherwise funkified text:
echo -e "\033[32mRun, forest green, run."
Without the "0" command, your output will continue to be processed, like so:
\033[0m
Running a command that uses console colors (e.g., ls) will also reset the console to the standard gray on black.
echo -e "\033[32mThis is green."
echo "And so is this."
echo "And this."
echo -e "\033[0mNow we're back to normal."
Programming Console Colors
Of 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:C:
printf("\033[34mThis is blue.\033[0m\n");
Perl:
print "\033[34mThis is blue.\033[0m\n";
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