This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org: --- Title : Bash Bits: Add colour output to your script Author : Remy van Elst Date : 18-09-2013 URL : https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Bash_Bits_Add_Color_Output_To_Your_Scripts.html Format : Markdown/HTML --- Bash Bits are small examples and tips for Bash Scripts. This bash bit shows you how to add coloured output to your scripts.

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[All Bash Bits can be found using this link][2] A little background first on how this all works. Coloured output has to be supported by your terminal emulator, but most modern ones support it. It works by sending specific control codes to your terminal. Terminal (control-)codes are needed to give specific commands to your terminal. A terminal control code is a special sequence of characters that is printed (like any other text). If the terminal understands the code, it won't display the character-sequence, but will perform some action. You can always print the codes with a simple echo command. Because there's a large number of different terminal control languages, usually a system has an intermediate-layer to talk to it. The real codes are looked up in a database for the currently detected terminal type and you give standardized requests to an API or (from the shell) to a command. One of these commands is tput - it accepts a set of acronymes and parameters for them, looks up the correct codes for the detected terminal in the terminfo database and prints the correct codes (the terminal hopefully understands). [You can read more about terminal control codes and tput in the terminfo(5) manual page, click this link for the online version][3] When I need to use colours in my scripts I often just use red and green. I have a set of functions which I use named after the colour: black() { echo "$(tput setaf 0)$*$(tput setaf 9)"; } red() { echo "$(tput setaf 1)$*$(tput setaf 9)"; } green() { echo "$(tput setaf 2)$*$(tput setaf 9)"; } yellow() { echo "$(tput setaf 3)$*$(tput setaf 9)"; } blue() { echo "$(tput setaf 4)$*$(tput setaf 9)"; } magenta() { echo "$(tput setaf 5)$*$(tput setaf 9)"; } cyan() { echo "$(tput setaf 6)$*$(tput setaf 9)"; } white() { echo "$(tput setaf 7)$*$(tput setaf 9)"; } Then when I need to colourize some output I can just use the function like so: `red "Error: Something went horribly wrong..."`. Down below you can find sample code which should print text in all the above defined colours: black "This is black text" red "This is red text" green "This is green text" yellow "This is yellow text" blue "This is blue text" magenta "This is magenta text" cyan "This is cyan text" white "This is white text" This image shows you how it looks on my terminal: ![Terminal Colours][4] And last but not least here is a bash command which prints out all colour that your terminal supports. Good to test if you have 256 colours enabled or not, plus it shows you the number to use with tput for that colour. ( x=`tput op` y=`printf %$((${COLUMNS}-6))s`;for i in {0..256};do o=00$i;echo -e ${o:${#o}-3:3} `tput setaf $i;tput setab $i`${y// /=}$x;done; ) [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=7435ae6b8212 [2]: https://raymii.org/s/tags/bash-bits.html [3]: http://linux.die.net/man/5/terminfo [4]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/terminal-colors.png --- License: All the text on this website is free as in freedom unless stated otherwise. This means you can use it in any way you want, you can copy it, change it the way you like and republish it, as long as you release the (modified) content under the same license to give others the same freedoms you've got and place my name and a link to this site with the article as source. This site uses Google Analytics for statistics and Google Adwords for advertisements. You are tracked and Google knows everything about you. Use an adblocker like ublock-origin if you don't want it. All the code on this website is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 license unless already licensed under a license which does not allows this form of licensing or if another license is stated on that page / in that software: This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . Just to be clear, the information on this website is for meant for educational purposes and you use it at your own risk. I do not take responsibility if you screw something up. Use common sense, do not 'rm -rf /' as root for example. If you have any questions then do not hesitate to contact me. See https://raymii.org/s/static/About.html for details.