5.1.5 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 and d programs. 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.

`-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, and nothing for regular files.

`--full-time'

List times in full, rather than using the standard abbreviation heuristics. The format is currently similar to that of date, but this is planned to change in a future release, partly because modern file time stamps have more precision. It's not possible to change the format, but you can extract out the date string with cut and then pass the result to date -d. See section `date invocation' in Shell utilities.

This is most useful because the time output includes the seconds. (Unix filesystems store file timestamps only to the nearest second, so this option shows all the information there is.) For example, this can help when you have a Makefile that is not regenerating files properly.

`--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.

`file-type'

Append `/' for directories, `@' for symbolic links, `|' for FIFOs, `=' for sockets, and nothing for regular files. This is the same as the `-p' or `--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'

`--kilobytes'

Print file sizes in 1024-byte blocks, overriding the default block size (see section 2.2 Block size).

`-m'

`--format=commas'

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

`-n'

`--numeric-uid-gid'

List the numeric UID and GID instead of the names.

`-p'

`--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.

`-x format'

`--format=across'

`--format=horizontal'

List the files in columns, sorted horizontally.

`-T cols'

`--tabsize=cols'

Assume that each tabstop 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.

`-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.