Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm extremely new to UNIX/Linux so apologies if I screw up the terminology.

I'm trying to figure out how to change the color of file names in BASH. For the most part I've got it working out but executable files are giving me some trouble.

I'd like a certain file type (*.inp) to be a different color than everything else, but all of our .inp files have executable privileges. For a few reasons it's really not feasible to change that. I tried adding by file type in the .dir_colors in my home directory:

.inp 01;35

but the line

EXEC 01;32

overrides that. If I delete the "EXEC 01;32" line, the BASH just defaults back to the one in /etc/. Is there any way to make file type override executable privileges in .dir_colors?

Thanks

What is your system? What version of ls do you have? My linux system doesn't even respond to ~/.dir_colors, it reads an environment variable LS_COLORS.

Best bet is to do dircolors -p > ~/.dircolors

Edit your ~/.dircolors and put your .inp at the top (or before EXEC) and then run eval $(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)

This re-sets up the LS_COLORS env var, and that's what ls --color=auto uses

Could you explain what dircolors -p > ~/.dircolors does?

I can't believe I didn't think to put .inp at the top either. I'll give that a shot when I get to work tomorrow. Forum usage is blocked there.

Thanks!

dircolors -p > ~/.dircolors exports the default dircolors configuration to a file name .dircolors in your home directory (replacing the file if it already exists).

This is so that you can start with what ls normally does without a LS_COLORS env var.