These options affect the appearance of the overall output.
List one file name per line, with no other information.
This is the default for ls when standard
output is not a terminal. See also the --escape (-b),
--hide-control-chars (-q), and --zero options
to disambiguate output of file names containing newline characters.
List one file per line. This is like --format=single-column except that it has no effect if long format is also in effect.
List files in columns, sorted vertically, with no other information.
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.
Specify whether to use color for distinguishing file types; when may be omitted, or one of:
Specifying --color and no when is equivalent to
--color=always.
If piping a colored listing through a pager like less,
use the pager’s -R option to pass the color codes to the terminal.
Using the --color option may incur a noticeable
performance penalty when run in a large directory,
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.
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. when may be omitted, or one of:
Specifying --classify and no when is equivalent to --classify=always. 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.
Append a character to each file name indicating the file type. This is like --classify (-F, except that executables are not marked.
Output codes recognized by some terminals to link to files using the ‘file://’ URI format. when may be omitted, or one of:
Specifying --hyperlink and no when is equivalent to --hyperlink=always.
Append a character indicator with style word to entry names, as follows:
Do not append any character indicator; this is the default.
Append ‘/’ for directories. This is the same as the -p option.
Append ‘/’ for directories, ‘@’ for symbolic links, ‘|’ for FIFOs, ‘=’ for sockets, and nothing for regular files. This is the same as the --file-type option.
Append ‘*’ for executable regular files, otherwise behave as for ‘file-type’. This is the same as the --classify (-F) option.
Set the default block size to its normal value of 1024 bytes, overriding any contrary specification in environment variables (see Block size). If --block-size, --human-readable (-h), or --si options are used, they take precedence even if --kibibytes (-k) is placed after
The --kibibytes (-k) option affects the per-directory block count written in long format, and the file system allocation written by the --size (-s) option. It does not affect the file size in bytes that is written in long format.
List files horizontally, with as many as will fit on each line, separated by ‘, ’ (a comma and a space), and with no other information.
Append a ‘/’ to directory names.
List the files in columns, sorted horizontally.
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 might not properly align columns to the right of a
TAB following a non-ASCII byte. You can avoid that issue by using the
-T0 option or put TABSIZE=0 in your environment, to tell
ls to align using spaces, not tabs.
If you set a terminal’s hardware tabs to anything other than the default,
you should also use a --tabsize option or TABSIZE
environment variable either to match the hardware tabs, or to disable
the use of hardware tabs. Otherwise, the output of ls may
not line up. For example, if you run the shell command ‘tabs -4’
to set hardware tabs to every four columns, you should also run
‘export TABSIZE=4’ or ‘export TABSIZE=0’, or use the
corresponding --tabsize options.
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. With a cols value of ‘0’, there is no limit on
the length of the output line, and that single output line will
be delimited with spaces, not tabs.
Output a zero byte (ASCII NUL) at the end of each line, rather than a newline. This option enables other programs to parse the output even when that output would contain data with embedded newlines. This option is incompatible with the --dired (-D) option. This option also implies the options --show-control-chars, -1, --color=none, and --quoting-style=literal (-N).