Comments on: A Better Ls for Mac OS X

By: Amish

Amish — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:46:48 +0000

Hi,

may be this is not the right place to ask, but is there a way to remove the “last login and so on…” string that appears everytime Terminal is opened? I’d like a clean prompt.

Kind regards

Amish

By: Elfar

Elfar — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:51:24 +0000

Works like a charm, thanks

By: robbie

robbie — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:47:41 +0000

thanks a lot of the guide, i’ve got it working except for one thing. my folders/files with full permission are shown with a blue text on green 34;42 which i do not have listed in the dir_colors from your site. I can hardly read the folder names and want to get rid of it .. is there another setting that is over riding the ones from here?

any help would be greatly welcomed.

By: Pseudo-Morph

Pseudo-Morph — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:01:18 +0000

Ok, ignore me. It helps if you look *really* closely at what you’re doing. Nigel’s approach did work when I implemented it correctly.

I am now one very happy camper.

By: Pseudo-Morph

Pseudo-Morph — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:13:25 +0000

Ok, so I speak too soon. Any idea why the prompt colours work but none of the other file associations work?

Adding a semi-colon to line 40 of .dir_colors as suggested above works to colour directories however results in the error ‘dircolors: /Users/pseudomorph/.dir_colors:40: invalid line; missing second token’.

This approach does not seem to work for other file associations. Any clues welcome.

By: Pseudo-Morph

Pseudo-Morph — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:56:45 +0000

Daz, thanks very much. I have just got this working on my Macbook.

For those that are interested I used fink to install the package ‘coreutils-default’ which is pretty much the same package from what I can tell.

The one difference I discovered using fink is the path variable within the .bash_profile. While you could just change this to read ‘export PATH=/sw/bin:/sw/sbin:$PATH’ fink also comes with a binary file (init.sh for Bash or init.csh for tcsh) that exports your path for you.

In this instance I added the line ‘. /sw/bin/init.sh’ to my .bash_profile. If you are using tcsh you will need to add the line ‘source /sw/bin/init.csh’ to your relevevent config file.

Now if only I could change that gawdy blue used for folders to something readable…

By: Ed Ruder

Ed Ruder — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:22:53 +0000

@Nigel: Your solution was the solution to my problem on OS X Leopard! Thanks very much, Daz!

By: Nigel Green

Nigel Green — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:09:55 +0000

Many thanks for this article - just what I needed! I had some trouble getting anything other than plain white text at first, but the answer for me was an extra semi-colon in the color refs (so DIR 0136 becomes DIR 01;36 for example). Thanks also to dotfiles.org for providing other peoples config files to crib from…

By: Daz

Daz — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:11:57 +0000

[ dweber melovg5 ~ ] bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.17(1)-release (powerpc-apple-darwin9.0)

Have you got the MacPorts version of ls installed and in use? Try the following: ls --version It should give you ls (GNU coreutils) 6.9, if you get the following:

ls: illegal option -- -
usage: ls [-ABCFGHLPRSTWabcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

then the MacPorts version of ls is not in use... Make sure you have installed it, then add the following to the top of your .bash_profile file:

# MacPorts
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH

then quit Terminal and start it up again - see how that goes. > How do these .dir_colors settings interact with the terminal preference settings? The terminal preference settings only affects the base colour of the text - in my screen shot, green on a black background. The .dir_colors file is used to manipulate the colour of files/folders depending on what they are.

By: Darren

Darren — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:41:00 +0000

By still boring, do you mean that the directories are just plain blue?

If they’re blue - things are working, if you want to play with the colours just edit the .dir_colors file to get something more to your tastes.

If the directories are still green somethings gone wrong there…

I have the same experience on Leopard (10.5.4) using Terminal with xterm-color and bash:

[ dweber melovg5 ~ ] bash --version GNU bash, version 3.2.17(1)-release (powerpc-apple-darwin9.0)

All entries in the directory listing are green text. How do these .dir_colors settings interact with the terminal preference settings?