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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.)

Qwertie
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2 Answers2

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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.

RalfFriedl
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  • I see, bash aliases are disabled in bash -c. bash -c "ls -l --color=tty" works as expected. It's easy to forget that ls doesn't really mean ls! – Qwertie Nov 09 '18 at 01:01
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A somewhat more general-purpose answer is to change bash -c to bash -ci.  The -i option puts the shell into “interactive” mode, which causes it to read the user’s .bashrc file and process aliases.

Scott - Слава Україні
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