An ls utility appeared in the first version of AT&T UNIX, the name inherited from a similar command in Multics also named 'ls', short for the word "list". is part of the X/Open Portability Guide since issue 2 of 1987. It was inherited into the first version of POSIX.1 and the Single Unix Specification. An ls command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2. Today, the two popular versions of ls are the one provided with the GNUcoreutils package, and that released by various BSD variants. Both are free software and open source, and have only minor syntax differences. The version of ls bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Richard Stallman and David MacKenzie.
Behavior
and Unix-like operating systems maintain the idea of a current working directory, that is, where one is currently positioned in the hierarchy of directories. When invoked without any arguments, ls lists the files in the current working directory. If another directory is specified, then ls will list the files there, and in fact the user may specify any list of files and directories to be listed. Files whose names start with "." are not listed, unless the -a flag is specified, the -A flag is specified, or the files are specified explicitly. Without options, ls displays files in a bare format. This bare format however makes it difficult to establish the type, permissions, and size of the files. The most common options to reveal this information or change the list of files are:
-l long format, displaying Unix file types, permissions, number of hard links, owner, group, size, last-modified date and filename
-f do not sort. Useful for directories containing large numbers of files.
-F appends a character revealing the nature of a file, for example, * for an executable, or / for a directory. Regular files have no suffix.
-a lists all files in the given directory, including those whose names start with ".". By default, these files are excluded from the list.
-R recursively lists subdirectories. The command ls -R / would therefore list all files.
-d shows information about a symbolic link or directory, rather than about the link's target or listing the contents of a directory.
-t sort the list of files by modification time.
-hprint sizes in human readable format. This option is not part of the POSIX standard, although implemented in several systems, e.g., GNU coreutils in 1997, FreeBSD 4.5 in 2002, and Solaris 9 in 2002.
-1 force output to be one entry per line.
It's normally possible to highlight different types of files with different colors, instead of with characters as -F would, but this is an area where the two main ls versions differ:
GNU ls uses the --color option; checks the Unix file type, the file permissions, and the file extension; and uses its own database to control colors.
FreeBSD ls uses the -G option; checks only the Unix file type and file permissions. and uses the termcap database
When the option to use color to indicate file types is selected, the output might look like: -rw-r--r-- 1 unixguy staff 26650 Dec 20 11:16 audio.ogg brw-r--r-- 1 unixguy staff 64, 64 Jan 27 05:52 bd-block-device crw-r--r-- 1 unixguy staff 64, 255 Jan 26 13:57 cd-character-device -rw-r--r-- 1 unixguy staff 290 Jan 26 14:08 image.png drwxrwxr-x 2 unixguy staff 48 Jan 26 11:28 di-directory -rwxrwxr-x 1 unixguy staff 29 Jan 26 14:03 ex-executable -rw-r--r-- 1 unixguy staff 0 Dec 20 09:39 fi-regular-file lrwxrwxrwx 1 unixguy staff 3 Jan 26 11:44 ln-soft-link -> dir lrwxrwxrwx 1 unixguy staff 15 Dec 20 10:57 or-orphan-link -> mi-missing-link drwxr-xrwx 2 unixguy staff 4096 Dec 20 10:58 ow-other-writeable-dir prw-r--r-- 1 unixguy staff 0 Jan 26 11:50 pi-pipe -rwxr-sr-x 1 unixguy staff 0 Dec 20 11:05 sg-setgid srw-rw-rw- 1 unixguy staff 0 Jan 26 12:00 so-socket drwxr-xr-t 2 unixguy staff 4096 Dec 20 10:58 st-sticky-dir -rwsr-xr-x 1 unixguy staff 0 Dec 20 11:09 su-setuid -rw-r--r-- 1 unixguy staff 10240 Dec 20 11:12 compressed.gz drwxrwxrwt 2 unixguy staff 4096 Dec 20 11:10 tw-sticky-other-writeable-dir
Sample usage
The following example demonstrates the output of the ls command given two different arguments : $ pwd /home/fred $ ls -l drwxr--r-- 1 fred editors 4096 drafts -rw-r--r-- 1 fred editors 30405 edition-32 -r-xr-xr-x 1 fred fred 8460 edit $ ls -F drafts/ edition-32 edit*
In this example, the user fred has a directory named drafts, a regular file called edition-32, and an executable named edit in his home directory. ls uses Unix file permission notation to indicate which users or groups are allowed to access each file or directory. drwxr--r-- 1 fred editors 4096 Mar 1 2007 drafts
In this example, drafts is a directory, and the characters after this indicate the permissions:
rwx: the owner has the right to read, write and execute
r--: group members have read-only permissions; write and execute are not permitted, as denoted by the hyphen characters
r--: others have read-only permissions; write and execute are not permitted
