> For the purposes of interaction with other system components, there > is to my knowledge no distinction between the behavior of gnu ls and > colorized gnu ls.
Here's an example: when a system enabled color ls by default (through its configuration files in /etc), as Slackware does, then the simple command "ls /foo/bar" will stat() every file in /foo/bar. If /foo/bar contains mountpoints to distributed filesystems, this can cause the file listing to take much longer than it would have otherwise. Slackware users at MIT commonly shoot themselves in the foot by doing "ls /afs", which runs off and tries to contact AFS fileservers on several different continents. If they hadn't been using color ls by default, they would have gotten a simple listing of the servers.
