/bin/ls --color=always fails to produce colorized output in shell-mode

Question

I have run M-x ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on.

Also, when I use /bin/ls --color=always (or /bin/ls --color=auto) in a regular terminal, I do see colors in the output.

It's only within Emacs' shell-mode that these commands fail to produced colorized output. (The variable LS_COLORS is set to the empty string in all cases.)

Strangely enough, grep --color=always does produce colorized output, even in shell-mode. The echoed commands are are also colorized.

(NB: in the illustration above I passed the options -1aF --color=always to /bin/ls, but I get the same "monochrome" output with no flags, or with any combination of flags, and with any argument for the --color option.)

Is there anything else I need to do to get /bin/ls to produce colorized output in shell-mode?

---

config

;; ~/.emacs

(add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on)
(require 'comint)
(set-face-attribute 'comint-highlight-prompt nil
                    :inherit nil)

# ~/.zshrc
LS_COLORS='';
export LS_COLORS

PS1=$'%# '

Answer 1

My Emacs (GNU Emacs 24.5.1) sets TERM=dumb in startup.el and my ls from GNU coreutils 8.24 checks TERM even with --color=always. dumb is not a terminal type recognized by dircolors (the utility used by ls to decide how to color the output), so running TERM=ansi ls --color=always in a *shell* buffer works as expected, while ls --color=always does not.

So, I would recommend creating an alias similar to

alias ls="TERM=ansi ls --color=always"