Add Color to your scripts¶

---- dataentry snipplet ---- snipplet_tags : terminal, color LastUpdate_dt : 2013-03-23 Contributors : Frank Lazzarini, Dan Douglas type : snipplet

Make your scripts output more readable using bash colors. Simply add these variables to your script, and you will be able to echo in color. (I haven't added all the colors available, just some basics)

# Colors
ESC_SEQ="\x1b["
COL_RESET=$ESC_SEQ"39;49;00m"
COL_RED=$ESC_SEQ"31;01m"
COL_GREEN=$ESC_SEQ"32;01m"
COL_YELLOW=$ESC_SEQ"33;01m"
COL_BLUE=$ESC_SEQ"34;01m"
COL_MAGENTA=$ESC_SEQ"35;01m"
COL_CYAN=$ESC_SEQ"36;01m"

Now if you want to output some text in color use echo -e instead of just echo. And always remember to use the \$COL_RESET variable to reset the color changes in bash. Like so ....

echo -e "$COL_RED This is red $COL_RESET"
echo -e "$COL_BLUE This is blue $COL_RESET"
echo -e "$COL_YELLOW This is yellow $COL_RESET"

But also see the notes in the article about using terminalcodes about generating codes and hardwiring codes.

This snipplet sets up associative arrays for basic color codes using tput for Bash, ksh93 or zsh. You can pass it variable names to correspond with a collection of codes. There's a main function with example usage.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

${ZSH_VERSION+false} || emulate ksh
${BASH_VERSION+shopt -s lastpipe extglob}

# colorSet [ --setaf | --setab | --misc ] var
# Assigns the selected set of escape mappings to the given associative array names.
function colorSet {
    typeset -a clrs msc
    typeset x
    clrs=(black red green orange blue magenta cyan grey darkgrey ltred ltgreen yellow ltblue ltmagenta ltcyan white)
    msc=(sgr0 bold dim smul blink rev invis)

    while ! ${2:+false}; do
        ${KSH_VERSION:+eval typeset -n "$2"=\$2}
        case ${1#--} in
            setaf|setab)
                for x in "${!clrs[@]}"; do
                    eval "$2"'[${clrs[x]}]=$(tput "${1#--}" "$x")'
                done
                ;;
            misc)
                for x in "${msc[@]}"; do
                    eval "$2"'[$x]=$(tput "$x")'
                done
                ;;
            *)
                return 1
        esac
        shift 2
    done
}

# Example code
function main {
    typeset -A fgColors bgColors miscEscapes
    if colorSet --setaf fgColors --setab bgColors --misc miscEscapes; then
        if ! ${1:+${fgColors[$1]:+false}}; then
            printf '%s%s%s\n' "${fgColors[$1]}" "this text is ${1}" "${miscEscapes[sgr0]}" >&3
        else
            printf '%s, %s\n' "${1:-Empty}" 'no such color.'
            typeset x y
            for x in fgColors bgColors miscEscapes; do
                typeset -a keys
                eval 'keys=("${!'"$x"'[@]}")'
                printf '%s=( ' "$x"
                for y in "${keys[@]}"; do
                    eval 'printf "[%q]=%q " "$y" "${'"$x"'[$y]}"'
                done
                printf ')\n'
            done
            return 1
        fi
    else
        echo 'Failed setting color arrays.'
        return 1
    fi 3>&1 >&2
}

main "$@"

# vim: set fenc=utf-8 ff=unix ft=sh :

Add Color to your scripts¶

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