Controlling what files to display

Question

I recently changed my emacs config to hide backup files by prepending a dot to the file name. This got me to thinking - is there a ready way to change the behavior within Bash to use a list of arbitrary globs for what files to hide? A quick scan of the bash and ls man pages didn't turn up anything.

Answer 1

ls has a --hide=PATTERN option that looks like it does what you want and can be overridden to show them with -a or -A. If you want this to happen automatically, add an alias in your ~/.bashrc (or, in the likely case that there is already an alias for it, add it to that alias).

$ touch {a,b,c}-{1,2,3}
$ ls
a-1  a-2  a-3  b-1  b-2  b-3  c-1  c-2  c-3
$ ls --hide=a*
b-1  b-2  b-3  c-1  c-2  c-3
$ ls --hide=*1
a-2  a-3  b-2  b-3  c-2  c-3
$ ls --hide=a*1
a-2  a-3  b-1  b-2  b-3  c-1  c-2  c-3
$ ls --hide=a*1 -A
a-1  a-2  a-3  b-1  b-2  b-3  c-1  c-2  c-3

There is also an --ignore=PATTERN that isn't overridden by the -a and -A options.

Answer 2

Here's my alias for ls:

alias ls="ls --color=auto --hide='*~' --hide='#*#'"

That hides files like backup.c~ and #autosave.h#. (And, opinionated as I am, I like colors, so it does that too.)