How to change the output color of echo in Linux

Question

I am trying to print a text in the terminal using echo command.

I want to print the text in a red color. How can I do that?

Answer 1

My favourite answer so far is coloredEcho.

Just to post another option, you can check out this little tool xcol

https://ownyourbits.com/2017/01/23/colorize-your-stdout-with-xcol/

you use it just like grep, and it will colorize its stdin with a different color for each argument, for instance

sudo netstat -putan | xcol httpd sshd dnsmasq pulseaudio conky tor Telegram firefox "[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+" ":[[:digit:]]+" "tcp." "udp." LISTEN ESTABLISHED TIME_WAIT

Note that it accepts any regular expression that sed will accept.

This tool uses the following definitions

#normal=$(tput sgr0)                      # normal text
normal=$'\e[0m'                           # (works better sometimes)
bold=$(tput bold)                         # make colors bold/bright
red="$bold$(tput setaf 1)"                # bright red text
green=$(tput setaf 2)                     # dim green text
fawn=$(tput setaf 3); beige="$fawn"       # dark yellow text
yellow="$bold$fawn"                       # bright yellow text
darkblue=$(tput setaf 4)                  # dim blue text
blue="$bold$darkblue"                     # bright blue text
purple=$(tput setaf 5); magenta="$purple" # magenta text
pink="$bold$purple"                       # bright magenta text
darkcyan=$(tput setaf 6)                  # dim cyan text
cyan="$bold$darkcyan"                     # bright cyan text
gray=$(tput setaf 7)                      # dim white text
darkgray="$bold"$(tput setaf 0)           # bold black = dark gray text
white="$bold$gray"                        # bright white text

I use these variables in my scripts like so

echo "${red}hello ${yellow}this is ${green}coloured${normal}"