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As shown in the above picture, When I do the command ls -a is one specific file name in red color. Why is it so?

javanoob
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  • take a look at man ls and ls --help | grep color. – cat Dec 24 '15 at 22:48
  • @kos your linked article says red is for archive file but then why is all other files displayed in green and just this one in red.. All files are jar files only. – javanoob Dec 24 '15 at 22:51
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    That is explained in the link as well. Sky blue = symbolic link. Try running ls -la, you'll see that permissions for the sky blue files will start with an l and that their filename will be something like ant-antlr.jar -> /some/other/path. – kos Dec 24 '15 at 22:54

1 Answers1

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The colours from ls are as follows:

  • Blue: Directory
  • Green: Executable or recognized data file
  • Sky Blue: Link
  • Yellow (black background): Device file
  • Pink: Graphics image file
  • Red: File Archive

cf: What do the different colors mean in ls? So most of the files are links, apart from the non-link file archive which is red.

Community
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Colin Ian King
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  • OK, sorry, I wanted to clarify why there seemed an inconsistency between the similar looking archives. Cross referenced link added. – Colin Ian King Dec 24 '15 at 23:39
  • Sorry about that, but I think you can understand how it looked from an external point of view. I removed my downvote, but really, you should vote to close duplicate questions instead of answering them: http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/14279/dont-be-too-eager-to-answer-a-question-you-know-the-answer-of. – kos Dec 24 '15 at 23:44
  • Your name is familiar. Are you the Colin Ian King I referenced in http://askubuntu.com/a/711465/158442? If so, can you give an authoritative answer there? – muru Dec 25 '15 at 10:00
  • Red may also happen to mean a broken link (a link to a nonexistent file path). I am not sure about Ubuntu as I have migrated to Manjaro with KDE5 seeking more Unity-like experience as Unity has been discontinued but at my system (Manjaro, recent KDE5 Konsole, FISH shell) it shows a broken link in red. – Ivan Dec 03 '18 at 23:27