How to determine a terminal's background color?

unix terminal x11 gnome-terminal
Romuald Brunet picture Romuald Brunet · Mar 24, 2010 · Viewed 8.1k times · Source

I'd like to know if there is any way to determine a terminal's background color ?

In my case, using gnome-terminal.
It might matter, since it's entirety up to the terminal application to draw the background of its windows, which may even be something else than a plain color.

Answer

ak2 picture ak2 · Oct 14, 2011

There's an xterm control sequence for this:

\e]11;?\a

(\e and \a are the ESC and BEL characters, respectively.)

Xterm-compatible terminals should reply with the same sequence, with the question mark replaced by an X11 color name, e.g. rgb:0000/0000/0000 for black.

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