The ls command lists the contents of a directory.
19
votes
3answers
989 views
What does size of a directory mean in output of 'ls -l' command?
What does size of a directory mean in output of ls -l command?
5
votes
3answers
276 views
When you type “ls -a”, what is the significance of “.” and “..”?
Whenever you type ls -a into the command prompt, you usually get all of your folders, files, and then you see that the first two entries are . and ..
Just curious, but what is the significance of ...
13
votes
2answers
8k views
How do I do a ls and then sort the results by date created?
In what order are the dated ordered by? Certainly not alphanumeric order.
ls -lt sorts by modification time. But I need creation time.
18
votes
6answers
3k views
what does the @ mean in ls -l?
I am using Mac OSX. When I type ls -l I see something like
drwxr-xr-x@ 12 xonic staff 408 22 Jun 19:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 xonic staff 306 22 Jun 19:42 ..
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 xonic staff 6148 25 ...
5
votes
5answers
5k views
How to report number of files in all subdirectories?
I need to inspect all sub-directories and report how many files (without further recursion) they contain:
directoryName1 numberOfFiles
directoryName2 numberOfFiles
7
votes
6answers
2k views
List files sorted numerically
I have a bunch of files from log1 to log164.
I'm trying to LIST the directory (sorted) in a UNIX terminal but the sort functions are only providing the format like this:
home:logs Home$ ls -1 | sort
...
13
votes
2answers
2k views
ls command: what does the first line mean?
I haven't been able to find this through internet, when I do ls -l I get this:
calico@A000505:~/Documentos$ ls -l
total 2020
-rwxr-xr-x 1 calico calico 8559 2010-11-16 11:12 a.out
-rwxrw-rw- 1 smt ...
11
votes
2answers
280 views
What is the number between file permission and owner in ls -l command output?
The output of ls -l command yields the following result:
What is the number field between file permission and owner? i.e. what are those 1, 1, 1, and 2? I checked the --help but that doesn't ...
27
votes
5answers
2k views
The result of ls * , ls ** and ls ***
I know using the command ls will list all the directories. But what does the ls * command do ? I used it and it just lists the directories. Is the star in front of ls means how deep it can list the ...
22
votes
5answers
2k views
Is there any option with 'ls' command that I see only the directories?
Sometimes, I need to check only the directories not files. Is there any option with the command ls? Or is there any utility for doing that?
EDIT: I'm using Mac OS X, and ls -d gives me . even though ...
7
votes
6answers
4k views
What's the best way to count the number of files in a directory?
If parsing the output of ls is dangerous because it can break on some funky characters (spaces, \n, ... ), what's the best way to know the number of files in a directory?
I usualy rely on find to ...
7
votes
2answers
1k views
Testing LS_COLORS in zsh
A few years ago I found an interesting code snippet that prints each type of file in its corresponding color according to the colors set up in LS_COLORS. Unfortunately, I can't remember the link ...
5
votes
2answers
219 views
How do regular expressions differ from wildcards used to filter files
While we use * to denote zero or more previous characters in grep, we use *.c to find all C files when we use it with the ls command like ls *.c. Could someone tell how the use of * differs in these ...
1
vote
1answer
307 views
How can I make ls show information about the directory specified only, not info about its sub-files or folder contents?
Say I have folder "foo" residing, the home directory. I want to get some info of it, owner, group, permissions, etc...
I then do this to try to get the information:
cd ~
ls -l foo
Of course it now ...
4
votes
2answers
198 views
Number of lines outputted by ls
When ls is called, it outputs all the files/directories in the current directory, attempting to fit as many as possible on each line. Why is it that when passed to wc -l, it outputs the number of ...
2
votes
2answers
92 views
Working of rm/ls with [0-9]
I am learning the shell commands and came across the short tags eg.[0-9],[[:digit:]] etc.. As a proof of concept i tried deleting all the files with the rm command(i know its not a good practise but i ...
0
votes
3answers
87 views
output only file names(with spaces) in ls -Al
I should echo only names of files or directories with this construction:
ls -Al | while read string
do
...
done
ls -Al output :
drwxr-xr-x 12 s162103 studs 12 march 28 12:49 personal ...
10
votes
2answers
390 views
Highlight the three last updated files in ls output
Is there any way to overload or wrap the ls command so that it will highlight / underline / otherwise make obvious the last three modified files?
I know that I can simply ls -rtl to order by reverse ...
10
votes
5answers
2k views
case-insensitive search of duplicate file-names
I there a way to find all files in a directory with duplicate filenames, regardless of the casing (upper-case and/or lower-case)?
9
votes
1answer
28k views
How to get only files created after a date with ls?
With ls command, does it possible to show only file created after a date, hour...
I'm asking it because I have a directory with thousand of files.
I want files created since yesterday.
I use ls ...
12
votes
1answer
2k views
ls taking long time in small directory
Running Ubuntu, I open a terminal and do
sudo bash
cd /
ls | head -n 1000
And predictably about 20 directories are returned.
However, if I do an ls, and don't pipe it into anything, the ls just ...
5
votes
4answers
951 views
What is the “directory order” of files in a directory (used by `ls -U`)?
According to the man page for ls, ls -U means:
do not sort; list entries in directory order.
What does "directory order" mean, and how is it determined?
The following test (executed on an ...
8
votes
3answers
6k views
Linux ls to show only filename date and size
How can I use ls in linux to get a listing of filenames date and size only. I don't need to see the other info such as owner or permission. Is this possible?
5
votes
4answers
141 views
Show sum of file sizes in directory listing
The Windows dir directory listing command has a line at the end showing the total amount of space taken up by the files listed. For example, dir *.exe shows all the .exe files in the current ...
4
votes
1answer
164 views
Why could the size of the “dot file” /. exceed 4096?
Today I found an "empty" directory with a size of 4MB.
It had no visible contents, so I tried ls -lah. This showed me some hidden files (not very large). Searching for the reason why the directory ...
4
votes
1answer
201 views
Symbolic links with ls, mv: forcing the functions to utilize “logical” addresses (remembering the original path)
It seems that for many basic functions operating on symbolic links, the physical path is used by default. However, cd works fine. When moving into a symbolic link, cd remembers where I came from so it ...
4
votes
4answers
356 views
ls command operating differently depending on recipient
How does commands like ls know what its stdout is?
It seems ls is operating different depending on what the target stdout is. For example if I do:
ls /home/matt/tmp
the result is:
a.txt b.txt ...
4
votes
2answers
1k views
Scrolling through ls output without a mouse
In some directories there are quite a few files. When I use ls the output is more than my terminal can handle. Typically I just use one of the following:
ls | less
ls | more
depending on my mood. ...
2
votes
3answers
2k views
How to search and replace text in all php-files in a directory and it's subdirectories
I am looking for a shell script that recursively traverses all .php files in a directory and performs a search & replace of a particular text pattern.
The search pattern is quite long ( > 5000 ...
0
votes
1answer
162 views
difficalty to save traceroute output in shell variable?
I need to filter and store traceroute output in shell variable (array). But I am getting some unusual output.
As I try to explain in following lines.
My present directory is temp, having some ...
11
votes
2answers
544 views
“ls -lh” reports total size less than sum of individual sizes
Under what circumstances would ls -lh show a total that is less than the sum of the individual files? For example:
$ ls -lh /var/lib/nova/instances/_base
total 100G
-rw-rw-r-- 1 nova nova ...
8
votes
4answers
11k views
How to list files without directories, and filter by name (ls options)
I have a directory called uploads. It contains a bunch of files, plus a few subdirectories which in turn contain files.
Is there a way I can (in one step) do the following:
List ONLY the files in ...
3
votes
1answer
118 views
Pass colors from ls through pipe to awk 'print' statement
This is a follow-up to my question from yesterday, Show sum of file sizes in directory listing.
Thanks to Zero Piraeus and a point in the right direction by Mauritz Hansen, I now have
function ...
2
votes
2answers
581 views
Setting up LS colors with a human-readable script in tcsh
I have a shell script (set_up_my_ls_colors.sh) that, if I call from my shell, it configures my color scheme for ls. The nice thing about the script is that it allows me to configure colors in a ...
2
votes
2answers
319 views
How do I show all files in a directory except those that have a certain extension AND display them in multiple columns?
Since I write in Python a lot it's kind of annoying to see .pyc files all the time and I would like to just hide them at this point. I tried the following, but I can't seem to figure out how to get it ...
2
votes
1answer
1k views
Why can't list file/directory relative to .. from a symbolic link directory (No such file or directory)?
I have a /usr/tomcat6/logs directory linked to /var/log/tomcat6.
When I changed directory to /usr/tomcat6/logs and try to ls files using a relative pathname ../conf/Catalina/localhost, a No such file ...
1
vote
1answer
217 views
How can I list LS_COLORS in colour?
I recall that eval "dircolors -b" used to display the colours that LS_COLORS was using, based on the file types or extensions. It was not simply the colour values that were displayed but the colours ...
