eval command giving error in WSL Ubuntu

Question

I am trying to use the solarized color scheme on wsltty using this tutorial and everything else worked except for the part where I need to copy these commands:

source ~/.mintty-colors-solarized/mintty-solarized-light.sh
eval (dircolors -c ~/.dir_colors | sed 's/>&\/dev\/null$//'

Since I am not using fish, I pasted the commands in the .bashrc file, but it's giving me this error:

-bash: .bashrc: line 119: syntax error near unexpected token 'dircolors'
-bash: .bashrc: line 119: 'eval (dircolors -c ~/.dir_colors | sed 's/>&\/dev\/null$//')'

I don't understand what to do. The solarized color scheme is coming but the text content like ls output are not coming for solarized scheme so I am sure this command has something to do with it. Can anybody help me? I don't have much experience with bash.

Answer 1

You are trying to use fish syntax in bash. These are two different shells and each has its own syntax, you can't just blindly copy commands from one shell to another and hope they will work.

The eval builtin in fish can apparently understand the parenthesized subshell you gave it, but that won't work in bash. Instead, use quotes:

eval "dircolors -c ~/.dir_colors | sed 's/>&\/dev\/null$//'"

Now I have no idea if this will work for bash, there may be other fish-specific rules in the tutorial. But this will at least run the command you are trying to run.