How to get only file names from an ls -la (ll) listing?

Question

I need a long (vertical) list of all file names of all files in a directory.

How to get only file names from an ls -la (ll) listing?

Only the names, not:

drwxr-xr-x 9 USER GROUP  4096 Jul 20 10:30 filename1
drwxr-xr-x 9 USER GROUP  4096 Jul 20 10:30 filename2
drwxr-xr-x 9 USER GROUP  4096 Jul 20 10:30 filename3
drwxr-xr-x 9 USER GROUP  4096 Jul 20 10:30 filename4
drwxr-xr-x 9 USER GROUP  4096 Jul 20 10:30 filename5

Rather I need only:

filename1
filename2
filename3
filename4
filename5

ls -1 should be the right answer for this question. – igor Nov 22 '23 at 08:03 — igor, Nov 22 '23 at 08:03

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 21 '22 at 07:39

5

Printing only filenames is the default behavior of ls. When you add -l you are saying you want the "long format" output. If you just remove -l I think that will give you what you want. You can leave -a to include "hidden" files

Also as Stéphane mentioned you could add -1 if you still want each file on its own line, which will happen with or without -1 when redirected to a file or piped to another command.

If you want to save this to a file you can use the > or >> operators as with any command. See Redirections and What are the shell's control and redirection operators?

edited Sep 21 '22 at 07:39

Stephen Kitt

434,908

answered Sep 20 '22 at 16:48

jesse_b

37,005

1

ls -1 seems to me to be what I needed. – user542162 Sep 20 '22 at 17:06
2

"you could add -1 if you still want each file on its own line." - if you redirect the output of the command to a file or a pipe you'll get one item per line even without this flag – Chris Davies Sep 20 '22 at 17:20
Ah. I wonder if @user542162 is mis-reading -l (letter "L") and -1 (number one) and assuming they're they same? That could explain part of the confusion I think – Chris Davies Sep 20 '22 at 17:29
1

@roaima I just didn't know about -1 as an option... – user542162 Sep 20 '22 at 17:40
@jesse_b I don't know how to name this, "vertical list"? "Long list"? – user542162 Sep 20 '22 at 17:43
@user542162 I would just describe it as needing each file to be on a newline. "long list" just describes what -l does. – jesse_b Sep 20 '22 at 18:09

telometto · Answer 2 · 2022-09-20T16:48:07.057

0

You can redirect the output directly to file by using > or >>.

E.g. ls -l > somefile.txt will create a file called somefile.txt containing the results of ls -l. Beware, though, as the single > will overwrite everything in the file you redirect to. Using >> will append the output to the file you choose to write to.

EDIT: ls -1 >> somefile.txt is probably the command you are looking for. For all files, ls -1a >> somefile.txt.

edited Sep 20 '22 at 16:48

answered Sep 20 '22 at 16:46

telometto

1,975

Sadly it also contains drwxr-xr-x 9 USER GROUP 4096 Jul 20 10:30 which I want not to take. – user542162 Sep 20 '22 at 16:47
Please check my edit. – telometto Sep 20 '22 at 16:48
When redirecting the output of ls, the -1 option is not needed. – Kusalananda Sep 21 '22 at 10:44

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 23 '23 at 11:09

0

Piping ls output to cat seems to work in my bash (Konsole) shell. Here is the output from my system.

$ ls | cat
bin
boot
cdrom
dev
etc
home
initrd.img
initrd.img.old
lib
lib32
lib64
libx32
lost+found
media
mnt
opt
proc
root
run
sbin
snap
srv
sys
tmp
usr
var
vmlinuz
vmlinuz.old
$

The ls -1 command preserves colorful text in output, whereas the above cat based command looses colors.

answered Jun 23 '23 at 11:09

Silver Moon

101

2

You're getting coloured output likely because you're actually running ls --color=auto instead of ls, possibly because you have a ls='ls --color=auto' alias or ls() { command ls --color=auto "$@"; } function in your shell customisation. Note that the fact that you get 1 column when the output goes to a file other than a terminal device (like a pipe) here is already noted in the accepted answer. – Stéphane Chazelas Jun 23 '23 at 11:16

How to get only file names from an ls -la (ll) listing?

3 Answers3