What do the different colors mean in ls?

What do the different colours in Ubuntu's ls command mean? For example, when I type the ls command in one of my folders, I get one of the files in light green, the other (which is a folder) in blue with green highlighting.

What do those colours mean, and there is any manual about all the colours?

Solution 1:

Blue: Directory
Green: Executable or recognized data file
Cyan (Sky Blue): Symbolic link file
Yellow with black background: Device
Magenta (Pink): Graphic image file
Red: Archive file
Red with black background: Broken link

For your information:

To turn the color off, you have to comment out the following lines in .bashrc.

# enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases
#if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then
#    test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)"
#    alias ls='ls --color=auto'
#    #alias dir='dir --color=auto'
#    #alias vdir='vdir --color=auto'
#
#    alias grep='grep --color=auto'
#    alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'
#    alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'
#fi

Also if you want to see your own bash color meanings,then copy/paste the following codes in your terminal.

eval $(echo "no:global default;fi:normal file;di:directory;ln:symbolic link;pi:named pipe;so:socket;do:door;bd:block device;cd:character device;or:orphan symlink;mi:missing file;su:set uid;sg:set gid;tw:sticky other writable;ow:other writable;st:sticky;ex:executable;"|sed -e 's/:/="/g; s/\;/"\n/g')           
{      
  IFS=:     
  for i in $LS_COLORS     
  do        
    echo -e "\e[${i#*=}m$( x=${i%=*}; [ "${!x}" ] && echo "${!x}" || echo "$x" )\e[m" 
  done       
}

Output:
terminal output

Note:

For more information, type man dir_colors in terminal.

Solution 2:

You can find out what colours ls uses by looking at the $LS_COLORS variable:

Turquoise: audio files¹
Bright Red: Archives and compressed files²
Purple: images and videos³

In addition, files are colourised by attributes:

alt text

aac, au, flac, mid, midi, mka, mp3, mpc, ogg, ra, wav, axa, oga, spx, xspf.
tar, tgz, arj, taz, lzh, lzma, tlz, txz, zip, z, Z, dz, gz, lz, xz, bz2, bz, tbz, tbz2, tz, deb, rpm, jar, rar, ace, zoo, cpio, 7z, rz.
jpg, jpeg, gif, bmp, pbm, pgm, ppm, tga, xbm, xpm, tif, tiff, png, svg, svgz, mng, pcx, mov, mpg, mpeg, m2v, mkv, ogm, mp4, m4v, mp4v, vob, qt, nuv, wmv, asf, rm, rmvb, flc, avi, fli, flv, gl, dl, xcf, xwd, yuv, cgm, emf, axv, anx, ogv, ogx.

All this information is contained in the output of dircolors --print-database, but its formatting is rather unreadable.

Here's a technical explanation of what's happening:

Example:

CHR 40;33;01

The colour code consists of three parts:

The first part before the semicolon represents the text style.
- 00=none, 01=bold, 04=underscore, 05=blink, 07=reverse, 08=concealed.
The second and third part are the colour and the background color:
- 30=black, 31=red, 32=green, 33=yellow, 34=blue, 35=magenta, 36=cyan, 37=white.

Each part can be omitted, assuming starting on the left. i.e. "01" means bold, "01;31" means bold and red. And you would get your terminal to print in colour by escaping the instruction with \33[ and ending it with an m. 33, or 1B in hexadecimal, is the ASCII sign "ESCAPE" (a special character in the ASCII character set). Example:

"\33[1;31mHello World\33[m"

Prints "Hello World" in bright red.

The command ls with the argument --color=auto (on Ubuntu, ls is an alias for ls --color=auto) goes through all the file names and tries first to match different types, like Executable, Pipe and so on. It then tries to match regular expressions like *.wav and prints the resulting filename, enclosed in these colour-changing instructions for bash.

Solution 3:

This expands on Karthick87's answer.

Full list, with the default setup

Uncolored (white): file or non-filename text (e.g. permissions in the output of ls -l) or multi-hardlink file
Bold blue: directory
Bold cyan: symbolic link
Bold green: executable file
Bold red: archive file
Bold magenta: image file, video, graphic, etc. or door or socket
Cyan: audio file
Yellow with black background: pipe (AKA FIFO)
Bold yellow with black background: block device or character device
Bold red with black background: orphan symlink or missing file
Uncolored with red background: set-user-ID file
Black with yellow background: set-group-ID file
Black with red background: file with capability
White with blue background: sticky directory
Blue with green background: other-writable directory
Black with green background: sticky and other-writable directory

Note that bold red looks orange, black looks dark grey, cyan looks blue/green, and bold magenta looks purple/pink/lavender.

Script to show colors

#!/bin/bash
# For LS_COLORS, print type and description in the relevant color.

declare -A descriptions=(
    [bd]="block device"
    [ca]="file with capability"
    [cd]="character device"
    [di]="directory"
    [do]="door"
    [ex]="executable file"
    [fi]="regular file"
    [ln]="symbolic link"
    [mh]="multi-hardlink"
    [mi]="missing file"
    [no]="normal non-filename text"
    [or]="orphan symlink"
    [ow]="other-writable directory"
    [pi]="named pipe, AKA FIFO"
    [rs]="reset to no color"
    [sg]="set-group-ID"
    [so]="socket"
    [st]="sticky directory"
    [su]="set-user-ID"
    [tw]="sticky and other-writable directory"
)

IFS=:
for ls_color in $LS_COLORS; do
    color="${ls_color#*=}"
    type="${ls_color%=*}"

    # Add description for named types.
    desc="${descriptions[$type]}"

    # Separate each color with a newline.
    if [[ $color_prev ]] && [[ $color != "$color_prev" ]]; then
        echo
    fi

    printf "\e[%sm%s%s\e[m " "$color" "$type" "${desc:+ ($desc)}"

    # For next loop
    color_prev="$color"
done
echo

Output with default setup:

gnome-terminal screenshot - default

Output with my setup (custom dircolors and custom Solarized terminal theme):

gnome-terminal screenshot - custom

I got the descriptions from dircolors -p and man dir_colors, and filled in the gaps with my own research.

The colors and descriptions are the same from 14.04 to 17.10.