Making your command line more helpful and fun!

The default terminal settings on most linux systems is to use colors to serve as hints about file types and permissions. For example, you'll see directory names in blue, executables in green, and file archives in red. And, if you don't want to see the colors -- like when they're just too distracting, you can turn them off easily. The command line colors are set when the ls command is aliased to an ls command that uses the --color option like this:

alias ls='ls --color=auto'

To turn off font colors for some period of time, you can just turn off the alias.

$ unalias ls

To turn off font colors all of the time, you can put the unalias command in your ~/.bashrc file or remove the alias command that sets it up in the first place, though that might be in your ~/.bashrc file or some system file.

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