Your terminal emulator can then choose to display different colors than those requested. I stress request to be displayed, because the colors a command requests are only what is sent to your terminal emulator. To do that, you probably want to be adjusting the color palette in your terminal emulator.įor instance, dircolors is not used to adjust the colors requested by grep, vi, tmux, or man.ĭircolors is used to adjust the colors that the commands ls and tree request to be displayed when displaying your filenames.

wav 01 04 05 38 5 160 48 5 240 # Pure madness: make bold (01), underlined (04), blink (05), fg color 160, and bg color 240!ĭircolors (short for Directory Colors) can't be used to modify colors globally. flac 48 5 240 # Set bg color to color 240 The format for 256 color escape codes is 38 5 colorN for foreground colors and 48 5 colorN for background colors. They won't work on the Linux text console, for example. You can use xterm's 256 color escape codes in your dircolors file, but be aware that they'll only work for xterm compatible terminals. I just bring this up to point out that setting dircolors for truly everybody depends on the shell they use.Īs for where dircolors gets its settings from, when you don't specify a file it just uses some builtin defaults. Your distribution might have zsh do that already. # $(dircolors) effectively sets the LS_COLORS environment variable.įor zsh, you'd either put it in /etc/zshrc or arrange for zsh to read /etc/profile on startup. To have this environment variable take effect system-wide, put it in your shell's startup file.įor bash, you'd put this in /etc/profile: # `dircolors` prints out `LS_COLORS='.' export LS_COLORS`, so eval'ing dircolors is merely a convenient way to generate this environment variable. Ls takes it color settings from the environment variable LS_COLORS.

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