How to get osx shell script to show colors in echo

I'm trying to add color output to my errors in a bash script that I have running on a mac. The problem is the colors are not working. I created the simplest of scripts to demonstrate that it does not work:

#!/bin/bash

echo -e "\e[1;31m This is red text \e[0m"

However, when i run it, I see no colors at all, as shown in this image. The color output of the ls command is working fine however.

Use \033 or \x1B instead of \e to represent de <Esc> character.

echo -e "\033[1;31m This is red text \033[0m"

See http://misc.flogisoft.com/bash/tip_colors_and_formatting

OSX ships with an old version of Bash that does not support the \e escape character. Use \x1B or update Bash (brew install bash).

Even better, though, would be to use tput.

In script files printf could be yet another option, you have to add trailing "\n" though.

#!/bin/bash

echo -e "\e[31mOutput as is.\e[m"
printf "\e[32mThis is green line.\e[m\n"
printf "\e[33;1m%s\n" 'This is yellow bold line.'

Tested on macOS High Sierra 10.13.6:

% /bin/bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin17)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Another option could be using zsh, which respects the \e notation.

#!/bin/zsh