color – Ryan Schulze

How to easily add colored text output in bash scripts

June 1, 2011September 27, 2014Ryan1 Commentbash, color, scripting

Here is small snippet that can give your shell scripts some nice output: colortext.sh As with the debug.sh script, just download it to the same directory as your own script and add it with

. colortext.sh

1	. colortext.sh

It contains one simple function called text with the syntax text “text to be output”. Color can be red, green, yellow, blue or grey. The function does not automatically add a linebreak to the putput, so pop a \n in there if you need it. I prefer using it together with printf for clean and easy color output.

Here are some examples of how the function can be used, and below the corresponding output:

. colortext.sh

echo "normal text"
text blue "blue text, "
text yellow "yellow text\n"

# Using it together with echo
echo -n "Status of script: [";text red "ERROR";echo "]"

# more elegant usage with printf
printf "Status of script: [%s]\n" $(text green "OK")

. colortext.sh

echo "normal text"

text blue "blue text, "

text yellow "yellow text\n"

# Using it together with echo

echo -n "Status of script: [";text red "ERROR";echo "]"

# more elegant usage with printf

printf "Status of script: [%s]\n" $(text green "OK")

Output:

normal text
blue text, yellow text
Status of script: [ERROR]
Status of script: [OK]