How to change the color of the output in Linux Bash?

Hi there,

Yes, you can do that with the ANSI escape characters. You can find a list of those characters here.

For example, if you wanted to print green text, you could do the following:

#!/bin/bash

# Set the color variable
green='\033[0;32m'
# Clear the color after that
clear='\033[0m'

printf "The script was executed ${green}successfully${clear}!"

A quick rundown of the script:

• First we set the green color as a variable
• After that we set a variable called clear so that we could reset the color of the terminal, otherwise all of the output will be green.
• Then using printf we printout the message

Here is the output of the script:

If you prefer using echo instead of printf you need to make sure that you add the -e flag:

#!/bin/bash

# Set the color variable
green='\033[0;32m'
# Clear the color after that
clear='\033[0m'

echo -e "The script was executed ${green}successfully${clear}!"

Here are some other common colors that you could:

#!/bin/bash

# Color variables
red='\033[0;31m'
green='\033[0;32m'
yellow='\033[0;33m'
blue='\033[0;34m'
magenta='\033[0;35m'
cyan='\033[0;36m'
# Clear the color after that
clear='\033[0m'

# Examples

echo -e "The color is: ${red}red${clear}!"
echo -e "The color is: ${green}green${clear}!"
echo -e "The color is: ${yellow}yellow${clear}!"
echo -e "The color is: ${blue}blue${clear}!"
echo -e "The color is: ${magenta}magenta${clear}!"
echo -e "The color is: ${cyan}cyan${clear}!"

Output:

You can also change the text background with the following:

#!/bin/bash

# Color variables
bg_red='\033[0;41m'
bg_green='\033[0;42m'
bg_yellow='\033[0;43m'
bg_blue='\033[0;44m'
bg_magenta='\033[0;45m'
bg_cyan='\033[0;46m'

# Examples

echo -e "The background color is: ${red}red${clear}!"
echo -e "The background color is: ${green}green${clear}!"
echo -e "The background color is: ${yellow}yellow${clear}!"
echo -e "The background color is: ${blue}blue${clear}!"
echo -e "The background color is: ${magenta}magenta${clear}!"
echo -e "The background color is: ${cyan}cyan${clear}!"

Output:

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby