mjhjmtu

No colors are displayed when running bash -c "ls -l" (CentOS 7.2). I have an obscure reason to want to show the colors after all. Can I disable this... color suppression?

For anyone wondering about my obscure use case: I'm running the Parcellite clipboard manager, which supports "actions" in a context menu, and one of the actions I've defined is "Run terminal command" which opens a new terminal and runs a command stored on the clipboard. It is implemented in the following way (so that the command is allowed to contain all special characters except apostrophe):

# Parcellite recognizes %s only once; store in a variable to use twice
CMD='%s' gnome-terminal -e "$SHELL -c 'echo \$ "$CMD"; eval $CMD; exec $SHELL'"
# Or equivalently....
CMD='%s' gnome-terminal -e $SHELL' -c "echo $ "$CMD"; eval $CMD; exec $SHELL"'

Because gnome-terminal can only run a single command and doesn't understand things like &&, I need to call bash -c ($SHELL -c) in order to interpret the command correctly and keep the shell running afterward (and since bash doesn't directly support that I have to also sneak in exec $SHELL at the end.)

It's not that colors are suppressed when you call ls that way, it's that colors are not enabled.

Your normal shell likely defines an alias for ls that includes --color=tty to enable colors, so just use that option when you call ls.