From the ls man page:

By default, color is not used to distinguish types of files. That is equivalent to using --color=none. Using the --color option without the optional WHEN argument is equivalent to using --color=always. With --color=auto, color codes are output only if standard output is connected to a terminal (tty). The environment variable LS_COLORS can influence the colors, and can be set easily by the dircolors command.

Have you tried the --color=always option?

In reply to Re: Capturing ANSI color escape codes with backticks by shawnhcorey
in thread Capturing ANSI color escape codes with backticks by Mr_Micawber

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