ls colour (COLORTERM / CLICOLOR)

Kyle Evans kevans at freebsd.org
Mon Jul 20 13:26:32 UTC 2020


On Sat, Jul 18, 2020 at 7:51 PM James Wright
<james.wright at digital-chaos.com> wrote:
>
>
>     Updated to 12.1-STABLE r363215 a few days ago (previous build was
> circa 1st June)
> but seem to have lost "ls" colour output with "COLORTERM=yes" set in my env.
>
>    Setting "CLICOLOR=yes" seems to enable it again, however the man page
> states that
> setting either should work?
>

Hi,

Indeed, sorry for the flip-flopping. The short version of the
situation is that I had flipped ls(1) to --color=auto by default based
on a misunderstanding of defaults elsewhere due to shell aliases that
I hadn't realized were in use. The ls(1) binary is historically and
almost universally configured for non-colored by default where color
support exists, and you should instead use appropriate shell alias for
ls=`ls -G` or `ls --color=auto`.

I can see where the manpage could describe the differences a little
better. CLICOLOR (On FreeBSD) historically meant that we'll enable
color if the terminal supports it, and setting it would have the same
effect as the above shell alias. COLORTERM is less aggressive and
won't imply any specific --color option, you would still --color=auto
to go with it for it to have any effect.

Thanks,

Kyle Evans


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