Monday, June 20, 2011

Listing Files

The ls (list) command, used by itself, lists the content of the working directory.

[ray@domain ~]$ ls
Desktop helloworld.txt


You can also retrieve a list of the files in another directory by adding the directory name, ex


[ray@domain ~]$ ls /home/ray
movies pictures documents music public desktop


Using ls by itself will show you the names of tiles in the directory, if you want  all  details you can add the -l flag to the command, ex.


[ray@domain ~]$ ls -l
total 16 files
drwxr-xr-x 2 ray staff 4096 5 Sep 15:21 Desktop
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ray staff 13 8 Sep 07:30 Hello World.txt


The data found above:

  • The first column represents the file permissions in the format discussed in section 1.2 File Persmissions. The first character tells us if the file is a directory or other (d equals a directory). The next nine characters show the permissions to (in order) Owner, Group, and Others.
  • The next column only useful for directories, as it tells you the number of files within it.
  • The next two columns identifies the owner and group
  • Next column is the size of the files in bytes
  • Next is the date and time of last modified, Hello World.txt above is modified September 8 at 07:30
  • Finally, the name of file
Hidden files in Linux start with a period. If you want to hide the Hello World.txt file you would change the name to .Hello World.txt (mind the dot in front of the filename!). Programs store user-specific configuration files by hidden using the period in front of the file. To see hidden files you use the flag -a, which can be used in conjunction with -l flag, ex.

[ray@domain ~]$ ls -la
total 16 files
drwx------ 13 ray  staff 714 19 Jun 20:24  .
drwxr-xr-x  5 root admin 306 17 June 14:44 ..
-re-------  1 ray  staff  14 08 June 15:55 .trash
drwxr-xr-x 2 ray staff 4096 5 Sep 15:21 Desktop
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ray staff 13 8 Sep 07:30 Hello World.txt

At the top of the listing are two directories, "." and "..", These are shortcuts to the current directory and the parent directory, respectively we will have a look at theses later on.

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