Linux ls Color Coding

It’s always driven me CRAZY the way that RedHat, Fedora, and presumably other Linux systems apply color coding to various types of files and directories in the output of the ls command. It wouldn’t be so bad, but it seems like the default colors for various file types and protection modes are just totally unreadable … for example black on dark green doesn’t show up that well!.

Well, today I finally got around to figuring out how to fix it … my preference being to just turn the feature off. Turns out it was pretty easy to do, open a terminal, su to root, and edit /etc/DIR_COLORS. Towards the top of the file there is a command that was set to COLOR tty, and to disable the colorization all I had to do was change it to COLOR none. Problem solved!

Of course if you look further down in the file you’ll see that there are all kinds of settings for the color palettes to be used for various file types, file protection modes, etc. You could spend time “refining” the colors that are used … but personally I’m happier with the feature just GONE!