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Comment by cerved | Hacker News Reader

ls assigned colors because it was configured to do so, either by you or your distribution.

> plus, it's unusable in a script, because then "ls" suppresses the color.

ls doesn't do anything different in a script, you probably just have an ls alias. Aliased are typically not sourced for non interactive shells

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it depends on the invocation, and by default it checks for tty or not. the aliasing often does not touch this.

example alias:

  $ alias ls
  ls='ls --color=tty'

and from ls(1): "With --color=auto, ls emits color codes only when standard output is connected to a terminal. The LS_COLORS environment variable can change the settings. Use the dircolors command to set it."

("tty" and "if-tty" are the same as "auto")

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