dircolors

When ls colours its output, it reads the colours from an environment variable named LS_COLORS. dircolors is the command that produces the value of that variable.

dircolors [options] [file]

dircolors does not set the variable itself — a command cannot change its parent shell's environment. Instead it prints shell commands that, when run by the shell, set LS_COLORS. The usual way to use it is to have the shell evaluate that output:

eval "$(dircolors)"

Put that line in a shell startup file and every ls --color afterwards picks up the colours. With no arguments, dircolors uses a built-in default colour scheme.

Choosing the shell syntax #

The commands dircolors prints have to match the shell that will run them. By default it guesses the syntax from the SHELL environment variable; these options state it outright.

If no shell option is given and SHELL is not set, dircolors cannot guess and reports an error.

Customising the colours #

To change the colours, you start from the default scheme, edit it, and feed it back.

The workflow is:

dircolors -p > ~/.dircolors      # save the default scheme to a file
# ...edit ~/.dircolors to taste...
eval "$(dircolors ~/.dircolors)" # load the edited scheme

When dircolors is given a file argument, it reads the colour definitions from that file instead of using the built-in database. The file maps file types and name extensions to colours; dircolors -p shows the format, with each line commented.

Exit status #