Colors disappeared from the terminal. How to get it back?

[CaptainRage]

Hey. I ran into a rather wonky issue which I fail to understand the cause of. When using ssh to connect to my Raspberry Pi, logging in as the root user and typing 'ls -la /boot/' I used to get:



The files are displayed in color. After I ran 'chmod -R 744 /boot' the colors disappeared after running the same command:



Why did this happen? The permissions haven't even changed, right? When logging in as another user (non-root) and typing 'ls -la /boot/' it will show up in color. Why is this happening and how to get the colors back for root?

I wanted to change the permissions for the files in /boot but they seem to have had the desired properties to begin with, so I don't get why the colors disappeared.

[WarheadsSE]

1) /boot on any is actually on the vFAT filesystem, which does not properly support the posix permissions bits, so trying to change these permissions is entirely fruitless.
2) Do these colors show in any other directory after you have run this command? Or does this happen system wide for the user ?

[CaptainRage]

1) Good point! The partition is indeed using the vFAT as filesystem. I had to mount the SD card with the /boot partition on another computer and copy over some files, due to an failure to upgrade the kernel, and I wanted to make sure that the permissions were right, that's why I ran that command. Apparently it was a completely uncessary thing to do.

2) It is the same for other directories. Strange, eh?

Another user when 'ls -la /':



root when 'ls -la /':



The / partition is mounted on an external HDD and is using ext4. I am pretty sure that the colors disappeared after running the command mentioned in the original post (as root).