10.1.5 General output formatting

These options affect the appearance of the overall output.

‘-1’

‘--format=single-column’

List one file per line. This is the default for ls when standard output is not a terminal.

‘-C’

‘--format=vertical’

List files in columns, sorted vertically. This is the default for ls if standard output is a terminal. It is always the default for the dir program. gnu ls uses variable width columns to display as many files as possible in the fewest lines.

‘--color [=when]’

Specify whether to use color for distinguishing file types. when may be omitted, or one of:

• none - Do not use color at all. This is the default.
• auto - Only use color if standard output is a terminal.
• always - Always use color.

Specifying --color and no when is equivalent to --color=always. Piping a colorized listing through a pager like more or less usually produces unreadable results. However, using more -f does seem to work.

Note that using the --color option may incur a noticeable performance penalty when run in a directory with very many entries, because the default settings require that ls stat every single file it lists. However, if you would like most of the file-type coloring but can live without the other coloring options (e.g., executable, orphan, sticky, other-writable, capability), use dircolors to set the LS_COLORS environment variable like this,

          eval $(dircolors -p | perl -pe \
            's/^((CAP|S[ET]|O[TR]|M|E)\w+).*/$1 00/' | dircolors -)

and on a dirent.d_type-capable file system, ls will perform only one stat call per command line argument.

‘-F’

‘--classify’

‘--indicator-style=classify’

Append a character to each file name indicating the file type. Also, for regular files that are executable, append ‘*’. The file type indicators are ‘/’ for directories, ‘@’ for symbolic links, ‘|’ for FIFOs, ‘=’ for sockets, ‘>’ for doors, and nothing for regular files. Do not follow symbolic links listed on the command line unless the --dereference-command-line (-H), --dereference (-L), or --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir options are specified.

‘--file-type’

‘--indicator-style=file-type’

Append a character to each file name indicating the file type. This is like -F, except that executables are not marked.

‘--indicator-style=word’

Append a character indicator with style word to entry names, as follows:

‘none’

Do not append any character indicator; this is the default.

‘slash’

Append ‘/’ for directories. This is the same as the -p option.

‘file-type’

Append ‘/’ for directories, ‘@’ for symbolic links, ‘|’ for FIFOs, ‘=’ for sockets, and nothing for regular files. This is the same as the --file-type option.

‘classify’

Append ‘*’ for executable regular files, otherwise behave as for ‘file-type’. This is the same as the -F or --classify option.

‘-k’

‘--kibibytes’

Set the default block size to its normal value of 1024 bytes, overriding any contrary specification in environment variables (see Block size). This option is in turn overridden by the --block-size, -h or --human-readable, and --si options.

The -k or --kibibytes option affects the per-directory block count written by the -l and similar options, and the size written by the -s or --size option. It does not affect the file size written by -l.

‘-m’

‘--format=commas’

List files horizontally, with as many as will fit on each line, separated by ‘, ’ (a comma and a space).

‘-p’

‘--indicator-style=slash’

Append a ‘/’ to directory names.

‘-x’

‘--format=across’

‘--format=horizontal’

List the files in columns, sorted horizontally.

‘-T cols’

‘--tabsize=cols’

Assume that each tab stop is cols columns wide. The default is 8. ls uses tabs where possible in the output, for efficiency. If cols is zero, do not use tabs at all.

Some terminal emulators (at least Apple Terminal 1.5 (133) from Mac OS X 10.4.8) do not properly align columns to the right of a TAB following a non-ASCII byte. If you use such a terminal emulator, use the -T0 option or put TABSIZE=0 in your environment to tell ls to align using spaces, not tabs.

‘-w’

‘--width=cols’

Assume the screen is cols columns wide. The default is taken from the terminal settings if possible; otherwise the environment variable COLUMNS is used if it is set; otherwise the default is 80.