What do the different colors mean in ls?

• Blue: Directory
• Green: Executable or recognized data file
• Cyan (Sky Blue): Symbolic link file
• Yellow with black background: Device
• Magenta (Pink): Graphic image file
• Red: Archive file
• Red with black background: Broken link

For your information:

• To turn the color off, you have to comment out the following lines in .bashrc.

  # enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases
  #if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then
  #    test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)"
  #    alias ls='ls --color=auto'
  #    #alias dir='dir --color=auto'
  #    #alias vdir='vdir --color=auto'
  #
  #    alias grep='grep --color=auto'
  #    alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'
  #    alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'
  #fi
  

• Also if you want to see your own bash color meanings,then copy/paste the following codes in your terminal.

  eval $(echo "no:global default;fi:normal file;di:directory;ln:symbolic link;pi:named pipe;so:socket;do:door;bd:block device;cd:character device;or:orphan symlink;mi:missing file;su:set uid;sg:set gid;tw:sticky other writable;ow:other writable;st:sticky;ex:executable;"|sed -e 's/:/="/g; s/\;/"\n/g')           
  {      
    IFS=:     
    for i in $LS_COLORS     
    do        
      echo -e "\e[${i#*=}m$( x=${i%=*}; [ "${!x}" ] && echo "${!x}" || echo "$x" )\e[m" 
    done       
  } 
  

Output:

Note:

• For more information, type man dir_colors in terminal.

You can find out what colours ls uses by looking at the $LS_COLORS variable:

• Turquoise: audio files¹
• Bright Red: Archives and compressed files²
• Purple: images and videos³

In addition, files are colourised by attributes:

---

1. aac, au, flac, mid, midi, mka, mp3, mpc, ogg, ra, wav, axa, oga, spx, xspf.

2. tar, tgz, arj, taz, lzh, lzma, tlz, txz, zip, z, Z, dz, gz, lz, xz, bz2, bz, tbz, tbz2, tz, deb, rpm, jar, rar, ace, zoo, cpio, 7z, rz.

3. jpg, jpeg, gif, bmp, pbm, pgm, ppm, tga, xbm, xpm, tif, tiff, png, svg, svgz, mng, pcx, mov, mpg, mpeg, m2v, mkv, ogm, mp4, m4v, mp4v, vob, qt, nuv, wmv, asf, rm, rmvb, flc, avi, fli, flv, gl, dl, xcf, xwd, yuv, cgm, emf, axv, anx, ogv, ogx.

---

All this information is contained in the output of dircolors --print-database, but its formatting is rather unreadable.

Here's a technical explanation of what's happening:

Example:

CHR 40;33;01

The colour code consists of three parts:

• The first part before the semicolon represents the text style.

  • 00=none, 01=bold, 04=underscore, 05=blink, 07=reverse, 08=concealed.

• The second and third part are the colour and the background color:

  • 30=black, 31=red, 32=green, 33=yellow, 34=blue, 35=magenta, 36=cyan, 37=white.

Each part can be omitted, assuming starting on the left. i.e. "01" means bold, "01;31" means bold and red. And you would get your terminal to print in colour by escaping the instruction with \33[ and ending it with an m. 33, or 1B in hexadecimal, is the ASCII sign "ESCAPE" (a special character in the ASCII character set). Example:

"\33[1;31mHello World\33[m"

Prints "Hello World" in bright red.

The command ls with the argument --color=auto (on Ubuntu, ls is an alias for ls --color=auto) goes through all the file names and tries first to match different types, like Executable, Pipe and so on. It then tries to match regular expressions like *.wav and prints the resulting filename, enclosed in these colour-changing instructions for bash.

This expands on Karthick87's answer.

---

Full list, with the default setup

• Uncolored (white): file or non-filename text (e.g. permissions in the output of ls -l) or multi-hardlink file
• Bold blue: directory
• Bold cyan: symbolic link
• Bold green: executable file
• Bold red: archive file
• Bold magenta: image file, video, graphic, etc. or door or socket
• Cyan: audio file
• Yellow with black background: pipe (AKA FIFO)
• Bold yellow with black background: block device or character device
• Bold red with black background: orphan symlink or missing file
• Uncolored with red background: set-user-ID file
• Black with yellow background: set-group-ID file
• Black with red background: file with capability
• White with blue background: sticky directory
• Blue with green background: other-writable directory
• Black with green background: sticky and other-writable directory

Note that bold red looks orange, black looks dark grey, cyan looks blue/green, and bold magenta looks purple/pink/lavender.

Script to show colors

#!/bin/bash
# For LS_COLORS, print type and description in the relevant color.

declare -A descriptions=(
    [bd]="block device"
    [ca]="file with capability"
    [cd]="character device"
    [di]="directory"
    [do]="door"
    [ex]="executable file"
    [fi]="regular file"
    [ln]="symbolic link"
    [mh]="multi-hardlink"
    [mi]="missing file"
    [no]="normal non-filename text"
    [or]="orphan symlink"
    [ow]="other-writable directory"
    [pi]="named pipe, AKA FIFO"
    [rs]="reset to no color"
    [sg]="set-group-ID"
    [so]="socket"
    [st]="sticky directory"
    [su]="set-user-ID"
    [tw]="sticky and other-writable directory"
)

IFS=:
for ls_color in $LS_COLORS; do
    color="${ls_color#*=}"
    type="${ls_color%=*}"

    # Add description for named types.
    desc="${descriptions[$type]}"

    # Separate each color with a newline.
    if [[ $color_prev ]] && [[ $color != "$color_prev" ]]; then
        echo
    fi

    printf "\e[%sm%s%s\e[m " "$color" "$type" "${desc:+ ($desc)}"

    # For next loop
    color_prev="$color"
done
echo

Output with default setup:

Output with my setup (custom dircolors and custom Solarized terminal theme):

I got the descriptions from dircolors -p and man dir_colors, and filled in the gaps with my own research.

The colors and descriptions are the same from 14.04 to 17.10.