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 compiled-in database is used. For details
on the format of these files, run ‘dircolors -p’.
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.
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.
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.
Coloured output for
ls(1)
is a GNU extension.
This implementation is not entirely compatible with the original
dircolors/color-ls package distributed with Slackware Linux. Notably, specific support
for the Z shell and Korn shell is not present. Users of these shells
should use the Bourne shell (-b) mode.
The program
dircolors itself does not use any configuration files. However,
customarily the shell initialization scripts invoke
dircolors with one of the following.
