BTEP maintains several Question and Answer Forums of interest to the NCI/CCR community.
Currently, there are forums on these topics listed below:
If you wish to ask a question go to the Ask Question Page and submit your question.
How to enable colors for the ls command
How do we get the "ls" command to print out directories/files in different colors?
1 Answer:
Typing "man ls" shows that -G is the flag that enables colorized output.
So to get it to print out colorized output, we would type "ls -G" in the terminal.
To make the "ls -G" be the default behavior for the ls command, we can add it as an alias (a shortcut) to our ~/.bashrc file
For the class, the ~/.bashrc file was created in this step of the computer set up instructions: https://www.biostarhandbook.com/bash-profile.html#bash-profile. and details about the .bashrc file are given here: https://www.biostarhandbook.com/terminal-init.html#terminal-init.
To edit your ~/.bashrc file, open it in a text editor (e.g. nano ~/.bashrc), and add the line:
alias ls='ls -G'
and save it.
Then either type: "source ~/.bashrc" or open a new terminal to see the changes.
Answered on April 22nd, 2020 by desiree.tillo@nih.gov