meaning of terminal colors?

[jms]

Hi, simple question here - how can you find what the meaning of the various colors in the terminal window are? Sometimes files or directories are different colors or even shaded, and sometimes they're all the same color.

Thanks.

[Mechrawr]

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ls -gG

This will both give you the long-listing including permissions but remove the user and group info (just to remove clutter).
Basically, the first column is what you're looking for. There are different colour schemes based on every terminal emulator and their settings, but they will generally be based on whether the item is a directory (denoted by the first d) as well as the combination of permissions: read, write and execute; three times in order of item owner (the owner can do these), item group (the group with which the owner is associated can do these) and any [other] (anyone can do these). These permissions can be changed with

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chmod [options] [file]

This page should help with using chmod.

[exchaoordo]

I had the same question, but I don't think you got an answer yet. I haven't changed an settings for the terminal and some things show up as green, others blue, I think blue is directories and white is files, but some things show up green and I don't know what that is supposed to mean.

[bjornmu]

I don't know where you'll find a full list, but green means the file has the execute bit set, meaning it probably is an executable program/script.

Character devices are yellow, sockets are purple... I thought softlinks should be red if they pointed to something that didn't exist. Hmm they do on my Fedora 13 box, the linked-to nonexistent file even blinks. This is configurable, your Mint may not do the same as mine....

[exchaoordo]

Okay, I found this:
http://linux.about.com/od/linux101/l/blnewbie5_4.htm


Seems to have the basic colors.