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There are two ways to do that. One is very simple (the same way you do it in MS-DOS), and is *wrong*. The right way is significantly more complex.

The deal is that unix is not tied hand and foot to one specific definition of a terminal. Hence the right way to do colored text is to find out 1) whether the current terminal supports color to begin with, 2) learn what kind of support for color it has, and 3) then send escape sequences as appropriate for 1 and 2 above.

Generally, the ncurses library is the most widely used method for manipulating terminal attributes, color or otherwise. That includes the TERMINFO database.

A good start (which will likely lead to other questions that you can use google to search for information about, and-or post here), is to read a couple of man pages:

man ncurses man terminfo

It might also be well worth your time to download the source code from

ftp:--invisible-island.net-ncurses

Because it includes example programs showing how to use it.

Note also that Thomas privatesey is the maintainer, and he is guaranteed going to read this thread, or anything else that mentions ncurses on Usenet. Hence if answers you get from people like myself are incomplete or simply wrong, you'll usually get a better answer from Thomas in short order.

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