Change My Color Settings

afaucett · 06-23-2011, 11:10 AM

Okay, so I've looked a ton of places to figure out how to change the colors of my files, directories, etc. in my bash shell. However, I can't get it done. I tried to set up a path to my bin directory (located in my home directory) and then save a script in there with information about colors (basically a DIR_COLORS directory I synced from another network). I then tried chmod to make it an executable file without luck. I really want to change colors so I can distinguish between different things within my shell. Please help! I am running on X11.

Additionally, if anyone knows how to set a path effectively to run scripts from .bash from any directory, that would be great to hear about, too.

Thanks!

Diantre · 06-23-2011, 12:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by afaucett

I tried to set up a path to my bin directory (located in my home directory) and then save a script in there with information about colors (basically a DIR_COLORS directory I synced from another network). I then tried chmod to make it an executable file without luck.

Read the dir_colors manpage, it will explain to you how it works and which files are involved:

Code:

man 5 dir_colors

In a nutshell, terminal colors are defined in /etc/DIR_COLORS, and a couple of environmental variables are set in the profile. In Slackware that's in /etc/profile.d/coreutils-dircolors.sh. You can use a file called .dir_colors in your home directory to override /etc/DIR_COLORS.

Quote:

Originally Posted by afaucett

Additionally, if anyone knows how to set a path effectively to run scripts from .bash from any directory, that would be great to hear about, too.

For that you can set your path in $HOME/.bash_profile and/or $HOME/.bashrc. Read the bash manpage in the INVOCATION section for details about these files. You can add your bin directories to the PATH like this:

Code:

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/your/bin/dir:/path/to/another/dir