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Unset background colour in shell script

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Inspired by the screenshots in this otherwise unrelated article https://itsfoss.com/tennis-csv-tool/ I'd like to highlight some lines in the terminal output of one of my zsh shell scripts.

Here a simplified version of what I puzzled together (the complete version is at the end of the post):

middeco=$'\n\e[38;5;208;48;5;214m\e[39m\e[38;5;231m'
stopdeco=$'\e[0;38;5;214m\e[0m\e[48;5;X'

file="some text"
echo "${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

file="some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text text some text some text "
echo "${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

file="some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text text some text some text "
echo "${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

screenshot showing the terminal output. First a short piece of text with orange background colour which fits in one line. Then a long text which spans over two lines. And last a medium length text which also spans two lines, but stops before half the second line is filled. The orange background colour stops with the text, but then restarts towards the end of the line

This works fine for short and long texts, but for medium length texts, the background colour starts to reappear towards the end of the second line (highlighted by the freehand circle in the screenshot).

Is there any way to avoid this?

Environment:

macOS Terminal.app v.2.15
window width: 96 columns
zsh v5.9

Just for completeness here the complete script including the nerdfont characters:

startdeco=$'\n\e[38;5;202m\e[38;5;231;48;5;202m'
middeco=$'\e[38;5;202;48;5;208m\e[38;5;208;48;5;214m\e[39m\e[38;5;231m'
stopdeco=$'\e[0;38;5;214m\e[0m\e[48;5;X'

file="some text"
echo "${startdeco}Reason: ${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

file="some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text text some text some text "
echo "${startdeco}Reason: ${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

file="some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text some text text some text some text "
echo "${startdeco}Reason: ${middeco} $file ${stopdeco}"

shell zsh

posted 2 months ago

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2mo ago

samcarter‭

186 reputation 5 3 30 13

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Seems like a typo? (1 comment)

1 answer

−0

Worked for samcarter‭

The following users marked this post as Works for me:

User	Comment	Date
samcarter‭	(no comment)	Apr 27, 2026 at 08:17

Simply remove \e[48;5;X, because it is an unknown escape sequence, and it breaks your terminal

Enhancements:

Remove extra escape sequences that are not needed

There is no need to reset the formatting and then reset some part of the formatting, and you can reset and set the colors as a whole in one complete sequence

In your sample you can do just:
middeco=$'\n\e[38;5;231;48;5;214m'
stopdeco=$'\e[0m'
In your complete script you can do:
startdeco=$'\n\e[38;5;202m\e[38;5;231;48;5;202m'
middeco=$'\e[38;5;202;48;5;208m\e[38;5;208;48;5;214m\e[38;5;231m'
stopdeco=$'\e[0;38;5;214m\e[0m'

posted about 2 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

2mo ago by Alexei‭

LolPopGames‭

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