So I know that there is a way to change the color of text for directories, regular files, bash scripts, etc. Is there a way to change the color to the file based on the _file extension_?
Example:
$ ls -l foo.txt [is red] foo.text [is blue] foo.secret [is green] foo.txt [is red] Yes, using the LS_COLORS variable (assuming GNU ls). The easiest way to manipulate that is to use dircolors:
dircolors --print-database > dircolors.txt will dump the current settings to dircolors.txt, which you can then edit; once you've added your settings,
eval $(dircolors dircolors.txt) will update LS_COLORS and export it. You should add that to your shell startup script.
To apply the example settings you give, the entries to add to dircolors.txt would be
.txt 00;31 .text 00;34 .secret 00;32 
.tar.gz 01;31 and .zip.gz 02;31 work? 02 doesn't match anything so 02;31 is equivalent to 00;31 (standard red). 02 is used to dim the color One way to do this (not the best way) is to make a custom shell function:
myls() { for f in *; do if [ "${f##*.}" = txt ]; then printf '\e[1;31m%s\e[0m\n' "$f" elif [ "${f##*.}" = text ]; then printf '\e[1;34m%s\e[0m\n' "$f" elif [ "${f##*.}" = secret ]; then printf '\e[1;32m%s\e[0m\n' "$f" else printf '%s\n' "$f" fi done } Further reading:
