That’s surprising. I have an older version of coreutils (9.7 from Debian 13) that doesn’t produce the links and formatting. I’m running bash and the behaviour you’re experiencing isn’t reproduced. Aliases aside, I wouldn’t expect the shell to be the cause. None the less, I installed version 4.0.2 of the fish shell and ran the same command in it and didn’t see any control characters. But that’s not really surprising - my old version of ls doesn’t produce them. So I ran ls | less because even with my version ls colour highlights files by type, but in the pipeline to less, there were no codes. If I run ls --color=always | less then I do see codes in the less output. You might check your environment variables to see if CLICOLOR_FORCE is set. Otherwise, I am out of ideas.