How to randomly generate ANSI colors in Bash/Perl?

Question

I want to generate ANSI colors randomly. It needs two features.

• Generated randomly
• Choice to generate from a specific color type e.g. randomly generate different shades of only grey or only green.

Answer 1

In bash, you need to use color escape sequences with echo -e

random_colors.sh

#!/bin/bash

TXT='the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.'
WORDS=( $TXT )
for WORD in "${WORDS[@]}"; do
    let "i=$RANDOM % 256"
    echo -en "e[38;5;${i}m$WORD e[0m";
done;
echo

Running this 10 times:

for i in `seq 1 10`; do bash random_colors.sh; done

Output

To get a particular palette, you will need to restrict the set of color numbers.

ANSI Escape Codes for Colors

Colors and Formatting