list files but not directory
William Case
billlinux at rogers.com
Fri Aug 21 17:51:47 UTC 2009
Hi;
On Fri, 2009-08-21 at 18:12 +0100, Albert Graham wrote:
> On 08/21/2009 03:35 PM, William Case wrote:
> > Now that I am familiar with 'find' and 'grep' etc. I no longer worry
> > about it. However, 'ls' is probably the first commandline command a
> > beginner learns. It seems illogical, that 'ls' wouldn't have a flag
> > that just shows files when it has a flag for directories. It can cost
> > newbies hours looking for a solution that isn't there.
> >
> >
> > Couldn't the shell maintainers just add an appropriate flag to show
> > files only?
> >
> >
>
> It would probably be easier to hack the ls source and extend the -A
> functionality.
Perhaps. But in the end, it is not something I NEED now. But when I
read the original post I thought back to my first days using Linux. It
was a chore figuring out what the color code for files etc. meant, or
what the identifying symbols where for etc. when all I wanted was to see
if my disappearing file was in which directory. It was, to say the
least, unnecessarily frustrating at the time.
A clean uncomplicated list of files would have been useful back then.
I would think something like the following would be useful:
]$ ls -z would show a list of just the files in the current directory
similar to the way 'ls' shows an unadorned list of directory contents.
('-z' is not a good mnemonic choice for "files" but seems to be
available as an option/flag.)
-z should have the property of being able to combine with other ls
options
eg
]$ ls -za -- to show dot files as well, or,
]$ ls -zl -- to show long list format of just files, or,
]$ ls -zlA /some/other/directory's/files/ -- to show long list format of
all files in a directory other than the current directory.
Without hacking ls -A, but by writing "alias lsf='ls -hl | grep ^-'" to
bashrc, lsf works well enough for the current directory. I still think
an addition to the options available in 'ls' would be helpful.
I am just wondering if this has been requested before or if this is a
request for enhancement that would not be entertained by the maintainers
of coreutils.
--
Regards Bill
Fedora 11, Gnome 2.26.3
Evo.2.26.3, Emacs 23.1.1
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