ls

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Change default colors

If you want to change the colours in the coloured output of ls, e.g. to get rid of the flashing red for broken symlinks1, do:

$ dircolors --print-database > ~/.dircolors

Change the following two files:

~/.bashrc

# Change the color for a broken symlink flashing red
# http://linux.overshoot.tv/ticket/6154 
d=~/.dircolors
test -r $d && eval "$(dircolors $d)"

Edit ~/.dircolors and change what you want. Remove the '05' in the following two lines to get rid of the flashing colour:

ORPHAN 01;37;41 # orphaned syminks
MISSING 01;37;41 # ... and the files they point to

globbing

The command ls does not use regexp to match patterns, but glob.
Thus the command ls [A-Z]* will not give the expected results (listing files starting with an upper case letter.
The proper command would be: ls [[:upper]]*

See:

$ man 7 glob

  • 1. A symlink to a file in an un-mounted external drive will be 'broken' without it constituting an actual error.

Issues related to this page:

ProjectSummaryStatusPriorityCategoryLast updatedAssigned to
Linux softwareNo menu in node `(coreutils.info.bz2)coreutils …activeminorbug report8 years 36 weeks
Linux DistributionHow to change the color for a broken symlink fl…activenormalsupport request8 years 36 weeks
Linux software /etc/ # grep -r dircolors *activenormalfeature request8 years 36 weeks