For some reason my shell script stopped printing my menu in color and is actually printing the literal color code instead. Did I somehow escape the color coding?
Script
#!/bin/bash
function showEnvironments {
echo -e "\e[38;5;81m"
echo -e " SELECT ENVIRONMENT "
echo -e "[1] - QA"
echo -e "[2] - PROD"
echo -e "\e[0m"
}
showEnvironments
Output
\e[38;5;81m
SELECT ENVIRONMENT
[1] - Staging
[2] - QA
\e[0m
I am using iTerm on Mac OSX and the TERM
environment variable is set to xterm-256color
.
There are several apparent bugs in the implementation of echo -e
in bash
3.2.x, which is what ships with Mac OS X. The documentation claims that \E
(not \e
) represents ESC, but neither appears to work. You can use printf
instead:
printf "\e[38;5;81mfoo\e[0m\n"
or use (as you discovered) \033
to represent ESC.
Later versions of bash
(definitely 4.3, possible earlier 4.x releases as well) fix this and allow either \e
or \E
to be used.