How do I echo just 1 column of output from ls command?

Question

Lets say when I do ls command the output is:

file1 file2 file3 file4

Is it possible to display only a certain column of output, in this case file2? I have tried the following with no success:

echo ls | $2

Basically all I want to do is echo only the second column, in this case, I want to echo:

file2

Answer 1

The following command will format the ls output into one column:

ls -1 /directory

Answer 2

The most reliable way to do this is to put the files into an array, and get the second one, which avoids having to do any parsing at all:

files=(*)
printf '%s\n' "${files[1]}"

The order in which you get back the files depends on the value of LC_COLLATE. As such, you might want to set LC_COLLATE=C first, if you want a "standard" sorting in all corner cases.

Answer 3

You would need to add -C as ls uses single-column mode when the output is not a terminal. awk then prints the second column:

ls -C | awk '{print $2}'

Answer 4

I think you are looking for

ls -1

It won't show permission, owner, group, date, size... but simple file name in single column.

Answer 5

As already has been mentioned - using columns for parsing ls output is not very robust because ls breaks the lines according to your file name lengths and terminal width. It often is interesting though to display a single column of a list of elements. You can do this using the cut command:

echo file1 file2 file3 file4 | cut -d" "  -f2

will display

file2

Note that -d allows you to select the column delimiter, so for example with

cut -d, -f2

you can display the second column of a comma separated list.

Answer 6

I just stumbled on this that seems to work:

(base) balter@winmac:~/winhome/gdsc_bq_etl/large_files/harmonized$ ls | cat
cell_lines_metadata.tsv
drug_metadata.tsv
gdsc1_anova_all_tcga_results.tsv
gdsc1_anova_pancancer_results.tsv
gdsc1_drug_ic50_resuults.tsv
gdsc2_anova_all_tcga_results.tsv
gdsc2_anova_pancancer_results.tsv
gdsc2_drug_ic50_results.tsv
genetic_features_all_tcga_metadata.tsv
genetic_features_all_tcga_results.tsv
genetic_features_pancancer_metadata.tsv
genetic_features_pancancer_results.tsv

Answer 7

The only way works for me is adding "-al". That is:

ls -C -al | awk '{ print $1 }'

Because -al add more columns like user, permissions, etc.

Answer 8

num_chars=54 # offset
ls -ltr | cut -c$num_chars-

change the number of characters (54) as necessary so you only get the data you want.

Answer 9

Suppose if you want to display only the particular filename under current path use below command

command:

find path -maxdepth 1 -iname "filename"|sed "s/\.\///g"

Answer 10

This is tricky, because parsing ls -C depends on:

1. filename length, (which itself depends on the specified file list passed to ls -C)
2. terminal width.
3. the fact that ls -C output is columnar, but might be configured to varying numbers of spaces as field separators.
4. the possibility of whitespace in filenames, (the display of which depends upon the particular ls display options chosen).

For now, let's start with the easier problem, (i.e. not #4 above), supposing that there's no whitespace in the filenames. To print column #2, this works:

COLUMNS=$COLUMNS ls -C | tr -s ' ' '\t' | cut -f2

Unrolling that:

• COLUMNS=$COLUMNS guarantees that the column length fed to | remains consistent with the current terminal display. Changing this to an arbitrary value works too, so COLUMNS=50 or COLUMNS=70 would cause ls -C to rearrange things according to those widths.

  Another method would be to use the -w switch, e.g.:

  ls -w${COLUMNS} -C | tr -s ' ' '\t' | cut -f2
  

• tr makes the field separators consistent: a single tab between each column.

• cut outputs the desired column.

Answer 11

To me the best answer is

$ ls -1 ../* | tr -s '\n' '\n'
../main.go
../main_test.go
../abort:
main.go
../beego:
beego
conf
controllers
go.mod
go.sum
lastupdate.tmp
main.go
routers
views
../bucket:
main.go
main_test.go
../c:
../cc:
main.go
main_test.go

It is the only command I found that supports multi directory traversing without blank lines and that outputs exactly 1 column like OP asked, and i needed to count them using wc!