In recent years colour displays have become very common, and users are beginning to exploit this by using programs that utilizes colours to give quick visual feedback on e.g. reserved keywords in programming languages, or instant notification of misspelled words.
As the Linux text console supports colour, the original GNU ls was quickly modified to output colour information and included in Slackware around version 2.0. Improved versions of these patches have now migrated into the standard GNU distribution of ls, and should therefore be a part of all new Linux distributions by now.
This revision is an update on a major rewrite from the initial release, including information on xterms and kernel patching.
The information in this document has been confirmed on Redhat 4.1, and was originally compiled with the 2.0.2 release of Slackware, and the 1.1.54 kernel. The kernel patch information was retrieved on slackware 2.2.0 with the 1.2.13 kernel, and tcsh as the default shell, and later confirmed with a 2.0.27 kernel. If you use any other configuration, or unix version, I would appreciate a note stating your operating system and version, and whether colour support is available as standard.