Disabling ls color option

Introduction

On the Euler cluster, the operating system automatically sets an alias for ls:

alias ls='ls --color=auto'

This color option causes a non-negligible overhead of metadata operations on our distributed filesystems (/cluster/work, /cluster/scratch), which has a negative impact on the performance and responsiveness of those file systems.

Removal of the default alias

In order to preserve the performance and responsiveness of the cluster's distributed filesystems the default alias for the ls command has been deprecated. This implies the option

'--color=yes'

has been removed from the simple ls call. Using

'ls -l' 

or

'ls --color=yes'

is discouraged on directories with thousands of files since it adds an important overhead. Please use these options only when necessary.