Tool Tip: “ls”

Yeah yeah, we know ls already.

But how much of ls‘s functionality do you actually use? There are so many switches to ls, that when Sun added extended attributes (does anyone use that?) they found that there were no letters left, so they had to use “-@” !

So, here are a couple of handy ls options, in no particular order; either for interactive or scripting use. I’m assuming GNU ls; Solaris ls supports most GNU-style features, but the “nice-to-have” features, like ls -h aren’t in historical UNIX ls implementations. I’ll split these into two categories: Sort ’em and Show ’em. What are your favourites?

Sort ’em

When sorting, I tend to use the “-l (long listing)” and “-r (reverse order)” switches:

Sort ’em by Size:

ls -lSr

Sort ’em by Date:

ls -ltr

Show ’em

There are a number of ways to show different attributes of the files you are listing; “-l” is probably the obvious example. However, there are a few more:

Show ’em in columns

ls -C

Useful if you’re not seeing as many as you’d expect.

Show ’em one by one

ls -1

That’s the number 1 (one) there, not the letter l (ell). Forces one-file-per-line. Particularly useful for dealing with strange filenames with whitespace in them.

Show ’em as they are

ls -F

To append symbols (“*” for executables, “/” for directories, etc) to the filename to show further information about them.

Show ’em so I can read it

ls -lh

Human-readable filesizes, so “12567166” is shown as “12M”, and “21418” is “21K”. This is handy for people, but of course, if you’re writing a script which wants to know file sizes, you’re better off without this (21Mb is bigger than 22Kb, after all!)

Show ’em with numbers

ls -n

This is equivalent to ls -l, except that UID and GID are not looked up, so:

$ ls -l foo.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 steve steve 46210 2006-11-25 00:33 foo.txt
$ ls -n foo.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 1000 1000 46210 2006-11-25 00:33 foo.txt

This can be useful in a number of ways; particularly if your NIS (or other) naming service is down, or if you’ve imported a filesystem from another system.

What’s your favourite?

What are your most-used switches for the trusty old ls tool?