Mac OSX: Cannot color broken symlinks

On my linux machine, you can tell intact symlinks from broken ones, because broken ones are colored red. I've tried to set this up on my mac by adding some configurations to PSCOLORS in my .bash_profile, but so far nothing has worked. I've managed to get the coloring to tell apart directories, files, executables, and symlinks. However, the broken symlinks are not a different color than intact symlinks. Searching around on google hasn't rendered any promising results. Ideas? Tricks?

well actually

Posted 2012-03-15T22:30:37.150

Reputation: 483

You might be successful in installing a port of Linux' ls that supports coloring symbolic links for their targets, and colors orphaned links. OS X's ls simply cannot do it. It's 150KB of source code vs. 25KB of source code...

– Daniel Beck – 2012-05-18T09:41:09.680

Answers

I don't think it's possible – the man page for ls doesn't list a color slot for broken symlinks.

Here's a handy find one-liner for finding broken symlinks:

find -L . -type l -ls

Tom

Posted 2012-03-15T22:30:37.150

Reputation: 76

Install Homebrew first.

Install GNU coreutils: brew install coreutils
Put the following in your ~/.bash_profile: eval $(gdircolors) alias ls="gls --color=auto"

Open a new shell, and broken links will be highlighted like on Linux.

Fish Monitor

Posted 2012-03-15T22:30:37.150

Reputation: 355

1don't forget to add the following alias in your ~/.bash_profile: alias ls="gls --color=auto" – carlito – 2014-10-31T14:43:26.257

1As it is just an output of dircolors, you can as well just put eval $(dircolors) in your ~/.bash_profile (if dircolors is installed) – Scz – 2016-11-11T10:27:54.303

Nice tips, I've added it to the answer. Thanks to @lorenzo. – Fish Monitor – 2016-11-20T02:35:32.887