Some terminals such as M-x shell in Emacs don't understand color output, and set the TERM environment variable to "dumb". ls should check that variable when turning on color from --color=auto.
For a use case of TERM=dumb which works around ls --color=auto, here's a snippet from /etc/skel/.bashrc in a Debian or Ubuntu system. # enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases if [ "$TERM" != "dumb" ]; then eval "`dircolors -b`" alias ls='ls --color=auto' #alias dir='ls --color=auto --format=vertical' #alias vdir='ls --color=auto --format=long' fi If this bug is considered in scope for ls, I can probably code up a patch pretty soon. -Lenny _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
