macOS – Fix ls Command Stopped Working

osxterminal

On my macOS (10.11.6) terminal, I did some installations on python virtual env. After that my ls command stopped working.
It is giving an error:

$ ls
ls: illegal option -- -
usage: ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUWabcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

$ alias ls
alias ls='colourify ls --color'

Best Answer

Which program really messed up with my ls cmd in the first place, is it python?

Your ls command is untouched. Your ls alias most likely comes from an erroneous Bourne Again shell setup.

Note that your ls alias is running a command named grc, via another alias named colourify. This comes from Radovan Garabík's Generic Colourizer, whose Bourne Again shell aliases (in grc.bashrc) and Z shell aliases (in grc.zsh) set up an alias named ls.

Somewhere, in an rc file, you are adding these aliases to your interactive Bourne Again shell, per recommendations like this Stack Overflow answer.

The Z shell alias is 

alias ls="grc --colour=auto ls"
which passes the --colour-auto option to the grc command, which is the command that takes that option.

However, The Bourne Again shell alias is 

alias ls='colourify ls --color'
which is (via the colourify alias) effectively 

alias ls='grc -es --colour=auto ls --color'
which is both running the output of the ls command through a colourizer and trying to get the ls command to colourize its output.

The basic problem is that the author of these Bourne Shell aliases (which was Isaias Piña from Oracle in May 2016) hasn't catered for running the Bourne Again shell on anything other than a Linux operating system, probably expecting that if you are using MacOS you are using something like Oh My Zsh. An additional problem is that the author hasn't allowed for grc to colourize the output of ls and is, rather, expecting ls to colourize its own output.

So you have a number of options:

  • Find where you are adding these aliases and fix Isaias Piña's erroneous ls alias to use the -G option on MacOS.
  • Find where you are adding these aliases and fix Isaias Piña's erroneous ls alias to not use any option and instead rely upon the colourizer's conf.ls file to do its actual job; as Tom Mulder has.
  • Find where you are adding these aliases and remove Isaias Piña's erroneous ls alias entirely, using the CLICOLOR environment variable for colourization instead; as Noel B Alonso does.
  • Find where you are adding these aliases and remove Isaias Piña's erroneous ls alias entirely, using your own ls alias; as Arthur Nisnevich does.
  • Uninstall the Generic Colourizer entirely.
  • Use the Z shell.
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