History: I was talking to Blair Nonnecke (nonnecke@umbc.edu) at a party and he mentioned that Mac users are coloring their file listings to help identify files. Why not do this for unix? This page shows the lsc program which hacks together this method.
The listring for this directory at some moment in the past was:
The program lsc is a unix script. It creates two files, listing and coliin. listing is the pure ascii form of the listing, generated with ls -C.
coliin is (in this case) a time sorted listing, with a column of numbers put on the left side. These numbers can be anything - 1 to the number of files, the file size, or anything you like. The name stands for 'coli in' since this is the input file to the coli program.
Coli stands for color list. the Sun binary and the pascal source code are available. Coli takes the listing and the coliin and produces a postscript program, the coliout.
The coliout is moved to the name ls.ps and then converted to the gif shown above with the pstogif program which is available as part of the latex2html package.
The last line of the listing gives (at the moment) the name and version number of the coli program, followed by a set of characters that show the color spectrum. The number of characters matches the number of files (for the moment), so you can see the ordering.
Obviously this code is a hack since it has too many parts, but maybe it will inspire you to do better!
My friend Jeff Haemer points out:
Gnu ls does color with the options '--8bit --color=tty'
(And the normal Linux installation aliases ls to "/bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS", where $LS_OPTIONS is '--8bit --color=tty -F -b -T 0').
Schneider Lab.
origin: 1999 March 1
updated: 1999 March 1