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If I do ls -G, I do get the colors. From what I understood from the man pages, if I go into ~/.bash_profile and add export CLICOLOR=1 I would then get colors by doing just ls, as "This option is equivalent to defining CLICOLOR in the environment."

Am I understanding this wrong? Because it's not working for me on Yosemite 10.10.5 in bash with homebrew coreutils(not sure how much of that is relevant). I tried adding this in ~./bashrc but same thing. I could always just alias my ls to ls -G, but I want to do this the "right" way. I also tried adding export LSCOLORS=... but it didn't help either. Like I said I do get colors with -G, but I'd like to get them by default by just typing ls and not having to set an alias for it, unless my understanding of how this works is wrong.

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    If you set the variable manually in your active shell, does ls have colors? It's possible your bash_profile is either not being sourced, or being overwritten for some reason
    – Vitalydotn
    Commented Nov 23, 2015 at 3:47
  • What happens if you run CLICOLOR=1 \ls ~ (the `` is intentional)?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Nov 23, 2015 at 7:26
  • See apple.stackexchange.com/questions/125060/… as well
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Nov 23, 2015 at 7:26
  • You likely didn't source the file. Run . ~/.bash_profile
    – JBallin
    Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 23:12

1 Answer 1

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A few issues.

Homebrew coreutils ls is not the OSX/freebsd ls. Coreutils is GNU, and that ls uses --colors instead of -G. -G in gnu ls means do not show groups. It does not use CLICOLOR either. There is no environmental variable to set colors for gnu ls.

OSX's ls uses -G as a command line option, in the same way that exporting CLICOLOR would as an environmental variable.

So you are using the wrong variable for the wrong command.

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