Thanks, Alejandro and Hannu, for your additional responses. I am again getting closer, but still not there. Please bear with me.
At the time, I did not quite understand this part from Alejandro: A> OK. In my experience, you can set the fg/bg colors the way you want A> by modifying the system settings in the shortcut (right-click on A> window bar and modify properties there), or by using *bold colors* in A> your definitions. For some reason, in the win32 console \e[00;30m is A> grey and \e[01;30m is white. Now that I know what these escape sequences mean (thanks to the document which Alejandro posted and [1]), I understand that part better. However, *whatever* I do, I can never get the text/foreground color white. 37 should do that, but it gives me light-grey instead (192/192/192 in "Selected Color Values" of Properties). Also Alejandro's escape sequences do not work for me. \e[00;30m gives me black text on a white background (i.e. no change) and \e[01;30m gives me light-grey text on a white background. 01 is Bold, so according to Alejandro that should give me white (text), but it gives me light-grey. The best I get sofar is: \cygwin\bin\echo -en '\033[37;40mThis is a text.\033[30;0m' Which gives me light-grey (instead of the desired white) text on a black (as desired) background. I still did not understand why the old (tin) executable on the old Cygwin B20 release could give white on black, because it seems to be a pure Win32 console issue. B20 apparently used /etc/termcap instead of terminfo (there is no terminfo directory), but also the B20 /etc/termcap ("cygwin" = "linux") escape sequences for rev/mr, smso/so and rmso/se give light-grey on dark-grey (instead of white on black). Those escape sequences were mr=\E[7m:so=\E[7m:se=\E[m However *those* (\E[7m and se=\E[m) escape sequences *do* bring me closer: If I use *those* (\E[7m and se=\E[m) escape sequences with *B20*'s echo(1) command, I *do* get white (desired) text on black (desired) background, while with the *new* (1.5.9) echo(1) command, I get light-grey (undesired) on dark-grey (undesired). I.e. in short: With B20 versus 1.5.9 echo(1) commands, I see the *exact same* behaviour as I see with the B20 versus 1.5.9 tin executables! So it seems that this is not a terminfo problem, but another type of Cygwin problem and that even something as simple as echo(1) is somehow 'terminal/color aware [2]! Anyone any idea *where* those (echo(1) et al related) color settings can be set? I.e. what makes 1.5.9's echo(1) command display a white-on-black escape sequence as lightgrey-on-black or lightgrey-on- darkgrey? [1] Linux Magazine September 2003 POWER TOOLS Escape Sequences Useful Text that You Can't See: http://www.linux-mag.com/downloads/2003-09/power/escape_sequences.html [2] For some reason *DOS* echo, type and "copy ... con" commands *display* [3] the escape characters instead of executing them, so I had to use echo(1). If someone knows a way to let *DOS* commands execute escape sequences insteas of displaying them, then please let me know. [3] Where the escape character is displayed as a (1-character) back-arrow character. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/