3.3.1.1. More about ls

Besides the name of the file, ls can give a lot of other information, such as the file type, as we already discussed. It can also show permissions on a file, file size, inode number, creation date and time, owners and amount of links to the file. With the -a option to ls, files that are normally hidden from view can be displayed as well. These are files that have a name starting with a dot. A couple of typical examples include the configuration files in your home directory. When you've worked with a certain system for a while, you will notice that tens of files and directories have been created that are not automatically listed in a directory index. Next to that, every directory contains a file named just dot (.) and one with two dots (..), which are used in combination with their inode number to determine the directory's position in the file system's tree structure.

You should really read the Info pages about ls, since it is a very common command with a lot of useful options. Options can be combined, as is the case with most UNIX commands and their options. A common combination is ls -al; it shows a long list of files and their properties as well as the destinations that any symbolic links point to. ls -latr displays the same files, only now in reversed order of the last change, so that the file changed most recently occurs at the bottom of the list. Here are a couple of examples:

krissie:~/mp3> ls
Albums/  Radio/  Singles/  gene/  index.html

krissie:~/mp3> ls -a
./   .thumbs  Radio     gene/
../  Albums/  Singles/  index.html

krissie:~/mp3> ls -l Radio/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x    2 krissie krissie  4096 Oct 30  1999 Carolina/
drwxr-xr-x    2 krissie krissie  4096 Sep 24  1999 Slashdot/

krissie:~/mp3> ls -ld Radio/
drwxr-xr-x    4 krissie krissie  4096 Oct 30  1999 Radio/

krissie:~/mp3> ls -ltr
total 20
drwxr-xr-x    4 krissie krissie  4096 Oct 30  1999 Radio/
-rw-r--r--    1 krissie krissie   453 Jan  7  2001 index.html
drwxrwxr-x   30 krissie krissie  4096 Oct 20 17:32 Singles/
drwxr-xr-x    2 krissie krissie  4096 Dec  4 23:22 gene/
drwxrwxr-x   13 krissie krissie  4096 Dec 21 11:40 Albums/

On most Linux versions ls is aliased to color-ls by default. This feature allows to see the file type without using any options to ls. To achieve this, every file type has its own color. The standard scheme is in /etc/DIR_COLORS:

More information is in the man page. The same information was in earlier days displayed using suffixes to every non-standard file name. For mono-color use (like printing a directory listing) and for general readability, this scheme is still in use:

A description of the full functionality and features of the ls command can be read with info coreutils ls.