Re: ls colored output does not work with Emacs backup files, #*#

[Eric Blake]

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According to Philip Ganchev on 8/11/2006 12:50 AM:
> The program "ls" cannot be configured to use a special color when
> listing backup files that start with a hash character (#).   A
> commonly encountered example of such files is backup files produced by
> Emacs: their names match the glob pattern #*#.

Actually dircolors and ls do not use glob patterns, but literal suffixes
(although I would like to see that changed, but have not had time to
propose a patch; and I don't know what performance hit using glob and/or
fnmatch will have compared to the current strncmp).  Which means only '.'
or '*' can start lines for suffix matching in the dircolors input.  And #
is the dircolors comment, so you have to resort to \043 or some other
escape sequence notation so that dircolors doesn't eat it as a comment.

With that in mind, you can feed this line to dircolors:
*\043 01;35

to get an LS_COLORS value that will turn emacs backup files magenta in an
ls listing.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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