Colour ls on NetBSD

Software

I realised using NetBSD in my homelab again just how much I’d come to rely upon colour as a visual cue. -F gets you useful hints like like / for directories and @ for symbolic links. But a week in, I do miss CLICOLOR=1 on FreeBSD.

NetBSD pkgsrc has colorls, which is easy enough to alias:

# pkgin install colorls
    
# echo alias ls="/usr/pkg/bin/colorls -FG" >> ~/.profile
# echo alias la="/usr/pkg/bin/colorls -aFG" >> ~/.profile

While I’m on the subject, colordiff does the same thing for diff, and colortail works wonders for immediately highlighting errors while tailing logs to troubleshoot.

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