How to turn off color with `ls`?

Color output for ls is typically enabled through an alias in most distros nowadays.

$ alias ls
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

You can always disable an alias temporarily by prefixing it with a backslash.

$ \ls

Doing the above will short circuit the alias just for this one invocation. You can use it any time you want to disable any alias.

With GNU ls, you can specify ls --color=never to explicitly disable color output. (Even if you have an alias ls='ls --color=auto', when you run ls --color=never, it will expand to ls --color=auto --color=never, and the later option takes precedence.)

You can also simply use (as on DOS):

dir

It will show the results without color, you can add the arguments same to ls, like -l.