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HTML rendering created 2026-05-25 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | DEFAULT SCHEME FILES FORMAT | ENVIRONMENT | FILES | EXAMPLES | COMPATIBILITY | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY |
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TERMINAL-COLORS.D(5) File formats TERMINAL-COLORS.D(5)
terminal-colors.d - configure output colorization for various
utilities
/etc/terminal-colors.d/[name.|[name]@term.]type
Files in this directory determine the default behavior for
utilities when coloring output.
The name is a utility name. The name is optional and when none is
specified then the file is used for all unspecified utilities.
The term is a terminal identifier (the TERM environment variable).
The terminal identifier is optional and when none is specified
then the file is used for all unspecified terminals.
The type is a file type. Supported file types are:
disable
Turns off output colorization for all compatible
utilities. See also the NO_COLOR environment variable
below.
enable
Turns on output colorization; any matching disable
files are ignored.
scheme
Specifies colors used for output. The file format may
be specific to the utility, the default format is
described below.
If there are more files that match for a utility, then the file
with the more specific filename wins. For example, the filename
@xterm.scheme has less priority than dmesg@xterm.scheme. The
lowest priority are those files without a utility name and
terminal identifier (e.g., "disable").
The user-specific $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/terminal-colors.d or
$HOME/.config/terminal-colors.d overrides the global setting.
The following statement is recognized:
name color-sequence
The name is a logical name for the color sequence (for example:
error). The names are specific to the utilities. For more details
always see the COLORS section in the man page for the utility.
The color-sequence can be a color name, an ANSI color sequence, or
an escape sequence.
Color names
Valid color names are: black, blink, blue, bold, brown, cyan,
darkgray, gray, green, halfbright, lightblue, lightcyan,
lightgray, lightgreen, lightmagenta, lightred, magenta, red,
reset, reverse, and yellow.
ANSI color sequences
An ANSI color sequence is composed of sequences of numbers
separated by semicolons. The most common codes are:
┌────┬──────────────────────────┐
│ │ │
│ 0 │ to restore default color │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 1 │ for brighter colors │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 4 │ for underlined text │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 5 │ for flashing text │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 30 │ for black foreground │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 31 │ for red foreground │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 32 │ for green foreground │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 33 │ for yellow (or brown) │
│ │ foreground │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 34 │ for blue foreground │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 35 │ for purple foreground │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 36 │ for cyan foreground │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 37 │ for white (or gray) │
│ │ foreground │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 40 │ for black background │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 41 │ for red background │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 42 │ for green background │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 43 │ for yellow (or brown) │
│ │ background │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 44 │ for blue background │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 45 │ for purple background │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 46 │ for cyan background │
├────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ 47 │ for white (or gray) │
│ │ background │
└────┴──────────────────────────┘
For example, to use a red background for alert messages in the
output of dmesg(1), use:
echo 'alert 37;41' >> /etc/terminal-colors.d/dmesg.scheme
Escape sequences
An escape sequence is needed to enter a space, backslash, caret,
or any control character anywhere in a string, as well as a hash
mark as the first character. These C-style backslash-escapes can
be used:
┌─────┬─────────────────────────┐
│ │ │
│ \a │ Bell (ASCII 7) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \b │ Backspace (ASCII 8) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \e │ Escape (ASCII 27) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \f │ Form feed (ASCII 12) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \n │ Newline (ASCII 10) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \r │ Carriage Return (ASCII │
│ │ 13) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \t │ Tab (ASCII 9) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \v │ Vertical Tab (ASCII 11) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \? │ Delete (ASCII 127) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \_ │ Space │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \\ │ Backslash (\) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \^ │ Caret (^) │
├─────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ │ │
│ \\# │ Hash mark (#) │
└─────┴─────────────────────────┘
Comments
Lines where the first non-blank character is a # (hash) are
ignored. Any other use of the hash character is not interpreted as
introducing a comment.
NO_COLOR
Disable output colorization unless explicitly enabled by a
command-line option. See https://no-color.org/ for more
details. Supported since util-linux version 2.41.
TERMINAL_COLORS_DEBUG=all
Enable terminal colors debug output.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/terminal-colors.d
$HOME/.config/terminal-colors.d
/etc/terminal-colors.d
Disable colors for all compatible utilities:
touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/disable
Disable colors for all compatible utils on a vt100 terminal:
touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/@vt100.disable
Disable colors for all compatible utils except dmesg(1):
touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/disable
touch /etc/terminal-colors.d/dmesg.enable
The terminal-colors.d functionality is currently supported by all
util-linux utilities which provide colorized output. For more
details always see the COLORS section in the man page for the
utility.
For bug reports, use the issue tracker
<https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.
terminal-colors.d is part of the util-linux package which can be
downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
<https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page is
part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux utilities)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2026-05-24. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
was found in the repository was 2026-05-20.) If you discover any
rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux 2.43.devel-739-eee2e 2026-05-24 TERMINAL-COLORS.D(5)
Pages that refer to this page: cal(1), column(1), dmesg(1), hexdump(1), cfdisk(8), fdisk(8), lsblk(8), sfdisk(8)
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HTML rendering created 2026-05-25 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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