How can I make ls only display files?

Question

I figure there has to be a way of making ls only display non-directories, but the man page doesn't make it obvious

Answer 1

ls -p | grep -v /

Using ls -p tells ls to append a slash to entries which are a directory, and using grep -v / tells grep to return only lines not containing a slash.

Answer 2

You may try this:

find . -maxdepth 1 -not -type d

And map this to a special alias.

But if you're really keen on using the ls command, here:

ls -p | egrep -v /$

Answer 3

Alternatively:

ls -lAh | grep -v '^d'

This method lists in

• -l Long list format
• -A Displays almost all (show hidden files but don't show . and ..)
• -h Human readable file sizes

while grep

• -v Don't show matching records
• Regular expression filter ^d - Those start with letter d (for directory) i.e drwxrwxr-x <some file details> <foldername>

If you don't want to type every time, you may make it into an alias for your bash/shell profile.

Answer 4

ls -F | grep -v /

Above command displays files, But it includes symlinks, pipes, etc. If you want to eliminate them too, you can use one of the flags mentioned below.

ls -F appends symbols to filenames. These symbols show useful information about files.

• @ means symbolic link (or that the file has extended attributes).
• * means executable.
• = means socket.
• | means named pipe.
• > means door.
• / means directory.

ls -F | grep -Ev '/|@|*|=|>|\|'

Above command displays only files.

Answer 5

If you want only files and don't want to perform any operation on them, then run:

ls -lA | grep -v '^d'

Or, if you want to iterate on each file, then for me this works:

ls *.?*

Answer 6

If you only want to see only files, directories or both.

Or if you want to see hidden files, directories or not.

Use these bash functions:

showVisibleFilesOnly() {
  ls -p | grep -v /
}
showVisibleFoldersOnly() {
  ls -p | grep / | grep "^."
}
showOnlyFilesIncludingHidden() {
  ls -Ap | grep -v / | grep "^."
}
showOnlyFoldersIncludingHidden() {
  ls -Ap | grep / | grep "^."
}
showHiddenFoldersOnly() {
  ls -Ap | grep / | grep "^." | grep "."
}
showHiddenFilesOnly() {
  ls -Ap | grep -v / | grep "^." | grep "."
}
showAllFilesAndFoldersIncludingHidden() {
  ls -Ap
}
showHiddenFilesAndFoldersOnly() {
  ls -Ap | grep "^."
}

Answer 7

I saw in your( @thinksinbinary ) comment on the answer by @thomasrutter , that you wanted to be able to print them in reverse order and in columns. You probably have already figured it out or moved on, but here it is:

ls -pr | grep -v / | column

• -p adds the forward slash ('/') to the directory names
• -r reverses the order of output
• -v lets grep do an inverse search to print everything except the directories (everything that doesn't have the '/' that -p put there)
• "column puts it in columns" - Captain Obvious

Answer 8

You might want to use du instead of ls. It will only output files. Then just awk '{print $2}' to output only the file path.

You have to use the -d option with du to limit depth. http://linuxcommand.org/lc3_man_pages/du1.html