We're quite fond of the style of the ebegin, eend, eerror, eindent etc commands used by Portage and other tools on Gentoo. The green-yellow-red bullets and standard layout make for very quick spotting of errors, on what would otherwise be very grey command line output.

#!/bin/sh
source /etc/init.d/functions.sh
ebegin "Copying data"
rsync ....
eend $?

Producing output similar to:

 * Copying data...                                                       [ OK ]

As a result we're using these commands in some of our common shell scripts, which is a problem for the people using Ubuntu and other linuxes. (linuces? linuxen? linucae? other distros)

On Gentoo these functions are provided by OpenRC, and imported with functions.sh file (whose exact position seems to vary slightly). But is there a simple way of getting these commands on Ubuntu?

In theory we could replace them all with dull echos, but we'd rather not?