How to determine a terminal's background color?

Question

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 1

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.

Answer 2

I've came up with the following:

#!/bin/sh # # Query a property from the terminal, e.g. background color. # # XTerm Operating System Commands #     "ESC ] Ps;Pt ST"  oldstty=$(stty -g)  # What to query? # 11: text background Ps=${1:-11}  stty raw -echo min 0 time 0 # stty raw -echo min 0 time 1 printf "\033]$Ps;?\033\\" # xterm needs the sleep (or "time 1", but that is 1/10th second). sleep 0.00000001 read -r answer # echo $answer | cat -A result=${answer#*;} stty $oldstty # Remove escape at the end. echo $result | sed 's/[^rgb:0-9a-f/]\+$//' 

Source/Repo/Gist: https://gist.github.com/blueyed/c8470c2aad3381c33ea3