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Adding colors to Bash scripts

Ifenna on November 23, 2019

I recently wrote a post-receive git hook for a server and I wanted to easily distinguish my hook's output from git information. This led me to look...
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Ben Sinclair •

Using escape codes directly is cool, but I'm a fan of using tput like this:

# SET Attribute Foreground <colour 123>
kindalightblue=$(tput setaf 123)
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There are a lot of handy things tput can do, and though the capabilities vary with your terminal, and though it's not completely portable either, you get all the colours your terminal can show.

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Ifenna • • Edited

I haven't heard about tput before. I'll definitely check it out.

EDIT: Just took a look. It's great. Thanks for the tip 🚀.

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jianwu •

Thanks for the great article. However in my environment, if I run the example, it will print the escape code literally. e.g.

$ echo -e "\e[32mRed text\e[0m"
\e[32mRed text\e[0m
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For me the solution is to use printf, e.g.

echo -e $(printf "\e[32mRed text\e[0m")`
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Toran Sahu •

Try $ echo -e "\033[32mRed text\e[0m"
\e[32mRed text\033[0m. i.e. \033 instead \e.

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Sombody101 •

Try using -ne rather than -e.

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Ariel Bogdziewicz •

This helped me as well in macOS. Thank you!

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laakkus • • Edited

I have RED already in use, so had to do this:

    NORMAL=0
    BOLD=1
    FAINT=2
    ITALIC=3
    UNDERLINE=4
    RED='\033[0;31m'
    ITALICRED=$(echo $RED|sed -e "s/\[./\[${ITALIC}/")
    FAINTRED=$(echo $RED|sed -e "s/\[./\[${FAINT}/")
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Keith • • Edited 
bgreen () { printf "\e[1m\e[32m" ; $@ ; printf "\e[0m"; }
red    () { printf      "\e[31m" ; $@ ; printf "\e[0m"; }

bgreen echo "Am I green?"
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Diego Torres Milano •

If you want to see the colors you can use this script: gist.github.com/dtmilano/4055d6df5... which uses tput.

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Placid Rodrigues •

Thank you for the super helpful post.
I think the first example should be: echo -e "\e[31mRed text\e[0m"
32 represents green.

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Johnny Bell •

Great article. Something that should be simple but is actually super hard to understand thank you

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Ifenna •

Glad to help.

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Kuberdenis •

Great post!

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Kliment Ognianov •

Just add '5' as a blinking special, non-colour code ;)

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Ifenna •

Thanks for noticing! Fixed it.