Comment 3 for bug 135201

What you are seeing is a broken link.

I was trying to figure out what those colors meant and using a search engine when I found your entry

Then I remembered that the colors were a feature of the ls command in UNIX/LINUX

I looked on the manual page for 'ls'; for my setup I had to go to the terminal command line and type "man ls"

The ls documentation said that you could use the command dircolors to set the colors, so I went to the manual page for dircolors "man dircolors". That page said I could see the database of settings by using the "-p" option. So at the command line, I typed "dircolors -p" this gave me several screens full of output so if your terminal emulator does not let you scroll back like mine does, you might want to use the 'more' command: "dircolors -p | more"

When I read through this output I found the codes for 'red' (31) and 'black background' (40). I also found the setting for ORPHAN 01;31;40. (01 is the code for bold.) The entry also has a comment explaining that ORPHAN is a broken symbolic link. A symbolic link were the file being pointed to does not exist.

I am new to Ubuntu, but I have played around with UNIX on and off for many years, sometimes I remember something useful.

I hope this helps you and others.

cheers.