Playing with terminal colors on your script

Most Linux shells include support for color (font and background), which can be used in many different ways. Today I will show how to change font color based on the output of a script. This way you can have colorful outputs depending on the exit code.

Here are the two example outputs of the script (function) we will be using. It simply checks if Apache is running and returns the color coded status:

$ isApacheUp  Apache is running $ isApacheUp  Apache is NOT running

Finding the mapping for the color codes is also quite easy. I will be providing some of the basic colors, but you can also try this really cool site to find additional color and background mapping - Google.

The basic usage for setting up the color is:

- Sets color (this case, white)

$ echo -e "\e[01;37m"

- Reverts color back to default

$ echo -e "\e[00m"

So if you want to change your terminal to other color, you can:

victor@Desktop:~$ echo -e "\e[00;34mPrompt to blue" Prompt to blue victor@Desktop:~$ echo -e "\e[00;31mPrompt to red" Prompt to red victor@Desktop:~$ echo -e "\e[00mPrompt to default" Prompt to default victor@Desktop:~$

Note that the color changes happens after you enter the code. So if you only want to change one word you will need to prefix the word with the new color code, and add the default color right after.

Here we can see the our Apache script using just that:

isApacheUp () { # Sets the font color GREEN='\e[00;32m' DEFT='\e[00m' RED='\e[00;31m' # Checks if the Apache process is running ps -ef | grep -i apache | grep -v grep > /dev/null ; STATUS=$? # Changes the color depending on grep's exit code if [[ $STATUS -eq 0 ]] ; then   echo -e "Apache is ${GREEN}running${DEFT}" else   echo -e "Apache is ${RED}NOT running${DEFT}" fi }

Font color mapping:

Black = ”\e[00;30m”
Dark Gray = ”\e[01;30m”
Blue = ”\e[00;34m”
Light Blue = ”\e[01;34m”
Green = ”\e[00;32m”
Light Green = ”\e[01;32m”
Cyan = ”\e[00;36m”
Light Cyan = ”\e[01;36m”
Red = ”\e[00;31m”
Light Red = ”\e[01;31m”
Purple = ”\e[00;35m”
Light Purple = ”\e[01;35m”
Brown = ”\e[00;33m”
Yellow = ”\e[01;33m”
Light Gray = ”\e[00;37m”
White = ”\e[01;37m”