In spite of the fact that a lot of people seem to loathe the colorized ls functionality, I sortof grew up on it(so to speak). OS X, by default, does not have this functionality(well, at least, GNU’s –color option never works). I figured the quick and easy way to solve this was to install coreutils, but I found another option. It appears OSX included a version of ls that works with ls -G. The coreutils one is (by it’s virtue as a GNU tool) probably more feature-driven, but realiasing it as

In other news, it finally really bugged me that OSX didn’t have a watch command. There’s sortof all kinds of stupidity about this floating around too, but I couldn’t find a good way to get it without recompiling. The watch program resides in the procps package for Linux, and you can download it here. Once you’ve downloaded it, open a command window and type in:

tar xzf procps-3.2.7.tar.gz; cd procps-3.2.7
cat make.patch | patch
make watch; cp watch /usr/local/bin

And then enjoy your watchy-goodness. And maybe delete the tarball and the associated directory. Oh, and make.patch is there for ya.

update 2015-08-23

Nowadays, you can just

brew install watch