Changing the colours in the output of "ls" command

During the last weeks I'm working quite often with Mac OSX. However I normally use a lot the terminal, but the default terminal in this OS is quite lame. Thus, I recommend to use the program iTerm. This terminal has some interesting features, which I don't want to discuss in detail. Take a look and decide yourself!

However there is an interesting feature which is not activated by default in this OS (and has nothing to do with the terminal program you use). It is the use of fancy colours according to the type of file when listing the content of a directory through the command ls. This is a very important feature, very useful to easily identify the kind of files you have into a directory. In fact, it has few to do with the fancy aspect, but with how comfortable you feel yourself working in a terminal.

To allow the use of colours you have to use the -G option. Nevertheless having to write this every time is a pain (you would type it a thousand times every day!). It's much easier to use an alias in the .bass_profile in your home

alias ls="ls -G"

Finally, in order to customize these coulours, you have to use the environment variable LSCOLOR. To do so, you only have to add also this line to the .bash_profile in your home:

export LSCOLORS="exfxcxdxcxegedabagacad"

But what in the hell means that line? Well, I could explain it in detail but... finally I would only sumarize the content of the man page of ls. So here I copy the explanations you may need, directly taken from this man page:

LSCOLORS The value of this variable describes what color to use for which attribute
when colors are enabled with CLICOLOR. This string is a concatenation of
pairs of the format fb, where f is the foreground color and b is the back-
ground color.

The color designators are as follows:

a black
b red
c green
d brown
e blue
f magenta
g cyan
h light grey
A bold black, usually shows up as dark grey
B bold red
C bold green
D bold brown, usually shows up as yellow
E bold blue
F bold magenta
G bold cyan
H bold light grey; looks like bright white
x default foreground or background

Note that the above are standard ANSI colors. The actual display may differ
depending on the color capabilities of the terminal in use.

The order of the attributes are as follows:

1. directory
2. symbolic link
3. socket
4. pipe
5. executable
6. block special
7. character special
8. executable with setuid bit set
9. executable with setgid bit set
10. directory writable to others, with sticky bit
11. directory writable to others, without sticky bit

The default is "exfxcxdxbxegedabagacad", i.e. blue foreground and default
background for regular directories, black foreground and red background for
setuid executables, etc.