iTerm2 loses "ls" colors if I ssh to a server

Question

Why do I lose ls' colors when I ssh to a server?

I would like those colors to be preserved. Is this possible? Should one do something on the server side?

Solution

The server doesn't use a colored ls command by default.

You can alias your ls command to always use colors in one of the server's shell configuration files (e.g. ~/.bashrc) with the --color=auto option.

alias ls='ls --color=auto'

Some additional remarks:

• If the server runs Linux, the above should be enough to get colors working. You can use an LSCOLORS generator to manually specify the colors in a shell configuration file by adding:

  export LS_COLORS=…
  

• If the server runs BSD / OS X, you additionally need the following for ls to automatically show colors (you then don't even need to specify an alias):

  export CLICOLORS=1
  

  Also, here it's not LS_COLORS, but LSCOLORS, and the syntax is different (see the LSCOLORS generator output).

  export LSCOLORS=…
  

Comments

[slhck]

Does it work when you run ls -G? Does the server's shell have CLICOLOR and LSCOLORS set? (i.e. echo $LSCOLORS)

[MEM]

ls -G don't show colors. If I do ls --color I get some. I don't know if the server shell as CLICOLOR and LSCOLORS set. If I echo CLICOLOR and LSCOLORS I got an empty line with nothing displayed.

[MEM]

Thanks. I believe I have no write access but, I'm using iterm2 with solarize. If I do ls --color what colors will it use ? Can we do something like export TERM =xterm-color or we can't do this since this is on our remote machine?