How to change the output color of a command

Table of Contents

You can color the output of any command using ANSI escape codes.

These are two examples:

echo -e "This is \033[31mred\033[0m"

d=`date`;echo -e "\033[31m$d\033[0m"

printf "\033[30;41mRed background, black text\033[0m"

• You can use echo -e or printf.
• The pattern for adding color is: \033[<FG ANSI code>;<BG ANSI code>m.
• 31 is the ANSI code for foreground color red.
• 0 resets the color.

Color name	Foreground color code	Background color code
black	30	40
red	31	41
green	32	42
yellow	33	43
blue	34	44
magenta	35	45
cyan	36	46
white	37	47

• You can find more color codes on Wikipedia.
• You can change the color of your terminal prompt by editing PS1 environment variable (on your .bashrc file for example).

[ricardo@myarch Documents]$ echo $PS1
[\u@\h \W]\$

{% include asciinema-script.html %}

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