Getting a List of Files in a Directory

Ever need a clean, single column, listing of all the files in a directory in *nix that you could output to a file? Maybe a list of all the series or movies you own.. Here are a couple of additions to the old ls command we all love ;P

ls --color=never --format=single-column

This command removes colours and lists the output in one single column

ls --format=single-column > ~/list-of-files.txt

The above command does the same as the previous command except that it doesn’t bother stripping colours because it then redirects the output into the file list-of-files.txt to be created in the current user’s home directory.

Here are some more variations for the two parameters/switches above:

• --color=[never|auto|always] – always being the default
• --format=[across|commas|horizontal|long|single-column|verbose|vertical] – these can also be expressed as [-x|-m|-x|-l|-1|-l|-c] respectively.

Peace Ooot!