Strange background color on external drive folder names I had folder on local Mac drive. And when I ls on terminal I see this:



But when I copied on external HDD (FAT filesystem) I see this when I call the same ls command in the same directory:



What does the background color mean?
Means that you and every body have permissions to write over directories. On your mac drive only you have perms to write inside.

Note that you folder on mac drive have perms drwxr-xr-x, and your external hd have drwxrwxrwx.

How to Set File Permissions in Mac OS X