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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 World33[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.

If you type dircolors (echo $LS_COLORS also works) from command line you will get a list of codes and colors for lots of filetypes in 1 line. dircolors --print-database shows them 1 line at a time. Here is a short list (I tried to put in the most important ones). At the bottom there is an explanation about what the different codes at the end of each lines represents:

NORMAL 00 # global default, although everything should be something.

FILE 00 # normal file

DIR 01;34 # directory

LINK 01;36 # symbolic link. (If you set this to 'target' instead of a

 # numerical value, the color is as for the file pointed to.)

FIFO 40;33 # pipe

SOCK 01;35 # socket

DOOR 01;35 # door

BLK 40;33;01 # block device driver

CHR 40;33;01 # character device driver

ORPHAN 40;31;01 # symlink to nonexistent file, or non-stat'able file

SETUID 37;41 # file that is setuid (u+s)

SETGID 30;43 # file that is setgid (g+s)

STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE 30;42 # dir that is sticky and other-writable (+t,o+w)

OTHER_WRITABLE 34;42 # dir that is other-writable (o+w) and not sticky

STICKY 37;44 # dir with the sticky bit set (+t) and not other-writable

# archives or compressed (bright red)

.tar 01;31

.tgz 01;31

# image formats

.jpg 01;35

.jpeg 01;35

.gif 01;35

.bmp 01;35

# audio formats

.aac 00;36

.flac 00;36

.ogg 00;36

• Attribute codes: 00=none 01=bold 04=underscore 05=blink 07=reverse 08=concealed
  


• Text color codes: 30=black 31=red 32=green 33=yellow 34=blue 35=magenta 36=cyan 37=white
  


• Background color codes: 40=black 41=red 42=green 43=yellow 44=blue 45=magenta 46=cyan 47=white
  

If you want to play around with this here is an example on how to set a color for a file:

export LS_COLORS=$LS_COLORS:"*.ogg=01;35":"*.mp3=01;35"  

This will set *.ogg and .mp3 to bold magenta. And if you put it in your .bashrc file it will become permanent.

None of the answers here include the 256 color options in the latest versions of Ubuntu. I'm color deficient (some colors give me trouble near each other) so the default blue directory on black is real hard for me to read. What follows is my research to change that.

Type dircolors -p |less to see your current color code.

The default .bashrc should already be configured not only to take advantage of the system color code, but also one in ~/.dircolors so dump the dircolors output to .dircolor so you can start with that using this command.
dircolors -p > ~/.dircolors

Alternative: pick up a very similar 256 color dircolors from seebi's solarized project.

Grab this colortest script and run it with the command colortest -w so you can see all the colors at once. Choose a color. I like the orange #208. I want that to be the text color so using this info on extended color codes, I can apply that.

So you have a color, now what. First we have to create the string.

The first number will be an attribute code, most likely 00, but if you want it to blink go with 05:

Pick an attribute code: 00=none 01=bold 04=underscore 05=blink 07=reverse 08=concealed

Next pick append ;38;5; to that attribute code to indicate your text color to get 00;38;5; and then append your color. I picked 208 so I get 00;38;5;208.

If you want to also put a background on it, pick another color (let's say 56) with the colortest script and the append ;48;5; for the background and 56 for the color to get a total string of 00;38;5;208;48;5;56.

So now you have it, what do you do with it?

vim ~/.dircolors and find the section you want to change (for me that is DIR) to the string we determined above "00;38;5;208".

This won't apply immediately, you'll need to load the config. Use dircolors ~/.dircolors to the get code to set your LS_COLORS variable. You could just paste that into your terminal session or you can close your terminal and reopen it. You could also pipe that into a file and run it as a shell script.

You can do this same procedure with 16 colors. You don't need the special ;38;5 or ;48;5 stuff. Just toss the numbers into the string and enjoy the simplicity.

Thanks to Dan and seebi for their notes and code on this.

This expands on Karthick87's answer.

With the default setup

• 
  Uncolored (white): file or non-filename text (e.g. permissions in the output of ls -l)


• 
  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

Script to show colors

#!/bin/bash

# For LS_COLORS, print type and description in the relevant color.



IFS=:

for ls_color in $LS_COLORS; do

    color="${ls_color#*=}"

    type="${ls_color%=*}"



    # Add descriptions for named types.

    case "$type" in

    bd) type+=" (block device)" ;;

    ca) type+=" (file with capability)" ;;

    cd) type+=" (character device)" ;;

    di) type+=" (directory)" ;;

    do) type+=" (door)" ;;

    ex) type+=" (executable file)" ;;

    fi) type+=" (regular file)" ;;

    ln) type+=" (symbolic link)" ;;

    mh) type+=" (multi-hardlink)" ;;

    mi) type+=" (missing file)" ;;

    no) type+=" (normal non-filename text)" ;;

    or) type+=" (orphan symlink)" ;;

    ow) type+=" (other-writable directory)" ;;

    pi) type+=" (named pipe, AKA FIFO)" ;;

    rs) type+=" (reset to no color)" ;;

    sg) type+=" (set-group-ID)" ;;

    so) type+=" (socket)" ;;

    st) type+=" (sticky directory)" ;;

    su) type+=" (set-user-ID)" ;;

    tw) type+=" (sticky and other-writable directory)" ;;

    esac



    # Separate each color with a newline.

    if [[ $color_prev ]] && [[ $color != $color_prev ]]; then

        echo

    fi



    printf "e[%sm%se[m " "$color" "$type"



    # 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.