DIRCOLORS

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: August 1998
 

NAME

dircolors - color setup for `ls'  

SYNOPSIS

dircolors [-b] [--sh] [--bourne-shell] [-c] [--csh] [--c-shell] [-p] [--print-database] [--help] [--version] [FILE]  

DESCRIPTION

dircolors outputs a sequence of shell commands to define the desired color output from ls (and dir, etc.). Typical usage:
eval `dircolors [OPTION]... [FILE]`

If FILE is specified, dircolors reads it to determine which colors to use for which file types and extensions. Otherwise, a precompiled database is used. For details on the format of these files, run `dircolors --print-database'.

The output is a shell command to set the LS_COLORS environment variable. You can specify the shell syntax to use on the command line, or dircolors will guess it from the value of the SHELL environment variable.

After execution of this command, `ls --color' (which one might alias to ls) will list files in the desired colors.

 

OPTIONS

-b, --sh, --bourne-shell
Output Bourne shell commands. This is the default if the SHELL environment variable is set and does not end with csh or tcsh.
-c, --csh, --c-shell
Output C shell commands. This is the default if SHELL ends with csh or tcsh.
-p, --print-database
Print the (compiled-in) default color configuration database. This output is itself a valid configuration file, and is fairly descriptive of the possibilities.
 

GNU STANDARD OPTIONS

--help
Print a usage message on standard output and exit successfully.
--version
Print version information on standard output, then exit successfully.
--
Terminate option list.
 

ENVIRONMENT

The variables SHELL and TERM are used to find the proper form of the shell command. The variables LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES have the usual meaning. The variable LS_COLORS is used to transfer information to ls.  

CONFORMING TO

Coloured output for ls(1) is a GNU extension.  

SEE ALSO

ls(1)  

NOTES

This page describes dircolors as found in the fileutils-3.16 package; other versions may differ slightly. Mail corrections and additions to aeb@cwi.nl and aw@mail1.bet1.puv.fi and ragnar@lightside.ddns.org . Report bugs in the program to fileutils-bugs@gnu.ai.mit.edu.

.\" Copyright Andries Brouwer, Ragnar Hojland Espinosa and A. Wik, 1998.
.\"
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