How to sort first directories then files etc… when using “ls” in Unix

Question

I would like to use the ls command to first show directories and then files. I tried:

ls -la | sort -k 1

But I got a wrong order.

Solution 1

The following command will list directories first, ordinary files second, and links third.

ls -la | grep "^d" && ls -la | grep "^-" && ls -la | grep "^l"

Also, it would make a great deal of sense to create an alias for this command to save keystrokes.

Edit:

If you want directories first, and then everything that is not a directory second, use this:

ls -la | grep "^d" && ls -la | grep -v "^d"

Solution 2

I do so love *nix and love seeing the inventiveness that goes into some of these replies...

Mine's not nearly as fancy on GNU Linux :

alias ls='ls --color -h --group-directories-first'

Given that I'm more comfortable with my linux CLI apps, I tend to also update coreutils on OSX :

brew install coreutils
alias ls='/usr/local/bin/gls --color -h --group-directories-first'

Solution 3

For the mac users, you can install coreutils.

This formula provides the GNU core utilities implementations, and for the commands that are also provided by macOS, they have been installed with the "g" prefix.

brew install coreutils
gls --color -h --group-directories-first

You can further simplify your life with an alias

alias ls='gls --color -h --group-directories-first'

Solution 4

There are certain things I want to see in a directory listing, and so far none of the answers here meets all of the requirements below. My requirements for a directory listing:

1. Directories and files are sorted alphabetically
2. Directories are listed first
3. Symbolic links (symlinks) are sorted like files
4. Sorting is case-insensitive
5. Sorting ignores all leading non-alpha characters in a filename
6. Listing includes the total count of directories (excluding ./ and ../), files, and links
7. Listing includes the total size (disk usage) of directories and files
8. The listing has to look the same on Linux and Windows (Git Bash shell) -- this was the hardest to get right since convenient options like --group-directories-first don't work in Git Bash for Windows

After much hacking about, I finally came up with a one-liner (albeit a very long line ;-)) that I'm satisfied with. I have assigned this to an alias named 'dir':

ls -dlF --color * .* | head -n2 && ls -AlF | LC_ALL=C grep "^d" | 
LC_ALL=C sort -k 9df && ls -AlF | LC_ALL=C grep "^[l-]" | 
LC_ALL=C sort -k 9df && echo -e `find -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name . | 
wc -l` Dir\(s\) `du -hs | cut -f 1`\\t\\t`find -maxdepth 1 -type f | 
wc -l` File\(s\) `find -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | du -ch --files0-from=- | 
tail -n 1 | cut -f 1`\\t\\t`find -maxdepth 1 -type l | wc -l` Link\(s\)

To make things easier to manage, I came up with separate commands to output each segment of the directory listing to my liking, then assembled them together using the && operator.

• ls -dlF --color * .* | head -n2 -- Extract ./ and ../. We don't want to pass these through sort because they are already in the correct order, and sorting them can result in ../ being listed first. The -d option is to get rid of the "total" line; I like to add -F to show the trailing slash for directories (it will also mark symlinks with "@" when you do a plain ls -F).

• ls -AlF | LC_ALL=C grep "^d" | LC_ALL=C sort -k 9df -- Extract the directories and sort them by filename (9th column), ignoring both non-alpha/space characters (d option) and character case (f option). The ls -A option excludes ./ and ../ from the listing since we already extracted them in the previous step. I tend to prefix all grep and sort commands with the LC_ALL=C locale reset so that (1) the output is consistent across Unix shells, and (2) you can sometimes see faster performance since it no longer has the overhead of the heavy UTF-8 character set to deal with.

• ls -AlF | LC_ALL=C grep "^[l-]" | LC_ALL=C sort -k 9df -- This is similar to the step above, but this time we are sorting files and symlinks.

• find -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name . | wc -l -- Get the number of directories, excluding ./ and ../.

• find -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l -- Get the number of files.

• find -maxdepth 1 -type l | wc -l -- Get the number of symlinks.

• du -hs | cut -f 1 -- Extract the total size of all subdirectories in human-readable format.

• find -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | du -ch --files0-from=- | tail -n 1 | cut -f 1 -- Extract the total size of all files in human-readable format.

Let's see our new dir alias in action!

BEFORE:

$ ls -alF
total 22
drwxr-xr-x   13 Tom      Administ     4096 Oct 25 02:38 ./
drwxr-xr-x    3 Tom      Administ        0 Dec 24  2014 ../
drwxr-xr-x   15 Tom      Administ     4096 Sep 17 01:23 .VirtualBox/
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ      615 Oct 25 02:38 .aliases
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ    12742 Oct 24 11:47 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ     3234 Oct 24 15:06 .bash_profile
drwxr-xr-x    1 Tom      Administ        0 Jan 24  2015 .gem/
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ      586 Oct 24 03:53 .gitconfig
drwxr-xr-x    1 Tom      Administ     4096 Dec 28  2014 .ssh/
drwxr-xr-x    4 Tom      Administ        0 Jan 24  2015 .travis/
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ     6645 Oct 25 02:38 _viminfo
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ     4907 Oct 24 15:16 profile
drwxr-xr-x    1 Tom      Administ        0 Oct 24 22:20 tmp/

AFTER:

$ dir
drwxr-xr-x   13 Tom      Administ     4096 Oct 25 02:38 ./
drwxr-xr-x    3 Tom      Administ        0 Dec 24  2014 ../
drwxr-xr-x    1 Tom      Administ        0 Jan 24  2015 .gem/
drwxr-xr-x    1 Tom      Administ     4096 Dec 28  2014 .ssh/
drwxr-xr-x    1 Tom      Administ        0 Oct 24 22:20 tmp/
drwxr-xr-x    4 Tom      Administ        0 Jan 24  2015 .travis/
drwxr-xr-x   15 Tom      Administ     4096 Sep 17 01:23 .VirtualBox/
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ      615 Oct 25 02:38 .aliases
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ    12742 Oct 24 11:47 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ     3234 Oct 24 15:06 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ      586 Oct 24 03:53 .gitconfig
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ     4907 Oct 24 15:16 profile
-rw-r--r--    1 Tom      Administ     6645 Oct 25 02:38 _viminfo
      5 Dir(s) 2.8M           6 File(s) 31K           0 Link(s)

One minor downside is that you cannot have colored listings, since the color control characters surrounding the filenames make the sorting too unreliable.

---

UPDATE

The alias above was painfully slow when executed from the root directory of a deep file system, so I have updated to this simpler but much more performant command:

ls -AFoqv --color --group-directories-first | tail -n +2 && find -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%s\n' | awk '{total+=$1} END {print total" bytes"}'

Sample output:

$ dir
drwxr-xr-x 1 Tom     0 Mar 29 13:49 .aws/
drwxr-xr-x 1 Tom     0 Mar 29 13:49 .gem/
drwxr-xr-x 1 Tom     0 Mar 29 19:32 .ssh/
drwxr-xr-x 1 Tom     0 Mar 29 13:49 .zbstudio/
drwxr-xr-x 1 Tom     0 Jun 16  2016 temp/
drwxr-xr-x 1 Tom     0 Jul 13  2016 vimfiles/
-rw-r--r-- 2 Tom   365 Mar 30 10:37 .aliases
-rw-r--r-- 1 Tom 16028 Mar 30 12:12 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 2 Tom  2807 Mar 30 12:12 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 2 Tom  2177 Mar 29 23:24 .functions
-rw-r--r-- 1 Tom  1091 Mar 30 10:34 .gitconfig
-rw-r--r-- 1 Tom  8907 Mar 29 14:45 _viminfo
-rw-r--r-- 1 Tom  2444 Jul 13  2016 _vimrc
33819 bytes

Since the new version of Git Bash for Windows supports --group-directories-first, we no longer have to fall back on sort. Even though the new alias doesn't display as much information as the previous alias, the performance gains are more than worth it. As a perk, you also get colors!

Solution 5

You've got several choices, depending if you want to keep alphabetical order.

You could simply try :

ls -al | sort -k1 -r

or this, to keep alphabetic order for files with the same permissions :

ls -al | sort -k1,1 -k9,9 -r

or, as eleven81 said (but this version lists everything) :

ls -la | grep "^d" && ls -la | grep "^-" && ls -al | grep -v "^[d|-]"

View more solutions

Comments

[Julian]

it's because - comes before d when using sort

[JRobert]

Old time unix heads (the ones from the pre-GUI age) used to capitalize their folder names and make plain-file names uncapitalized to get that result automagically.

[ippi]

Useful question! Perhaps it's time to change the accepted answer to one that is simpler and doesn't break terminal colors?

[Diogo]

Try ls -lh --group-directories-first

[eleven81]

This would only work if you could be absolutely certain that every directory had no dots in its name.

[Studer]

This command doesn't list everything if there are, for example, sockets or FIFOs in the folder

[brice]

This is a nicer solution IMO. Using several processes and pipes to do sorting instead of piping to sort seems kind of backwards. Especially since ls- al|sort -k1 -r works. What was missing is just the -r flag.

[MEM]

unfortunately, this doesn't work on osx terminal, since -- option is not available.

[allyourcode]

re love: Is that sarcasm? If so, I'd agree.

[Tamara Wijsman]

What do these do? Where did you learn to type them?

[Edward J Beckett]

Well My preferred OS is Debian Linux. Debian's gnu core utils package version of ls supports the --show-directories-first option ... when I started using OSX I simply grabbed my all my bash dot files from my Debian box and dropped them in my home directory ... I had a lot of bash_aliases that broke so ... It was then that I had to figure out some work-arounds for my aliases ...

[Edward J Beckett]

The first one is a bit redundant ... There's really no reason to sort for the directories as it's the order we need to modify not directories ... the 'ls -la | sort -r' is what really works. Basically it's stating ... 1) A) Find . -d 1 -type d (Start from this directory, search one directory depth and search for directories only) B) ls -la (list files all attributes) C) Sort them in reverse 2) Do as 1) just drop the find ... it's not needed ... I actually like Studers' solution better ... :-)

[Ry4an Brase]

That edited version should still work with other types. The first grep says everything that starts with a 'd', and the second says everything that doesn't start with a 'd'. Surely everything either starts with a d or doesn't, right?

[Alex]

great :) didn't know about the "alias" command :)

[Mark]

To make the first one show other files too: ls -la | grep "^d" && ls -la | grep "^-" && ls -la | grep -E "^d|^-" -v | grep -v "^total"

[FCTW]

@Mark -- Why not just do: ls -la | grep "^d" && ls -la | grep "^-" && ls -la | grep -v -E "^d|^-|^total"?

[jonathanserafini]

Re: Doesn't work on mac ... True enough, personally though I generally do a brew install coreutils to override the mac builtins for my local user.

[andrybak]

To pipe &&-divided commands to less: cat <(ls -la | grep "^d") <(ls -la | grep -v "^d") | less -r

[Kevin]

Why alias ls? Why are we aliasing an already-existing command, and isn't typing ls --group-directories-first easy enough?

[jonathanserafini]

Purpose of alias ls is to define the configuration elements I want to use 90% of the time. Less keystrokes to achieve the desired output. If you ever then want to have native ls output you can always /bin/ls.

[aliteralmind]

To make @FCTW's command an OSX alias, add this to your ~/.profile: alias la="ls -la | grep \"^d\" && ls -la | grep \"^-\" && ls -la | grep -E \"^d|^-\" -v | grep -v \"^total\""

[FCTW]

@aliteralmind Wouldn't it just be easier to use single quotes so that you wouldn't have to escape the double-quotes?

[Paul Irish]

gls rather. Right?

[benesch]

Yes, by default. You can also use coreutils by default with PATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH".

[Six]

Just an fyi this doesn't appear to work. You need to use long listing format (ls -l) in order to filter by file type like that. Also, this command will break on spaces (in bash). You need to quote like so: "$@" If you want to use this approach, you could do something like so: function lss {local temp="$(command ls -l --color=always "$@")"; egrep --color=never '^d|total' <<<"$temp"; egrep --color=never -v '^d|total' <<<"$temp"}

[cde]

@AndrewAshbacher no it won't. One, OSX uses bash as default most of the time. Second, it has no builtin LS. Third, it is based on BSD, not GNU/Linux. The commands above are based on the GNU Coreutils LS.

[jonathanserafini]

Updated with the OSX variant with brewed coreutils

[Ričardas Sabaliauskas]

@brice The thing that bothers me about 'sort' is that ./ and ../ won't be the first two lines, in that order. Other than that, I agree that it's the more efficient solution.

[Giacomo1968]

Great answer! But when you say, “After much hacking about, I finally came up with a one-liner…” Yes, indeed that is not really a “one liner” in the classic sense. It might make sense to take that logic and make it a standalone shell script and just run that or call it as an alias.

[Ričardas Sabaliauskas]

@JakeGould You are fast! I haven't even finished proof-reading my answer yet and you already finished reading it and shot off a comment :). Yeah, it's a prime candidate for a function, but I was too lazy at the time, so just threw it into my .bash_aliases file. On the other hand, I usually only write a function when I cannot do something without passing parameters.

[Tuncay Göncüoğlu]

it might not be as fancy, but I'd prefer a command line parameter to a fancy pipe-to-single-line-script every time. No need to use a bazooka to kill a fly. Thanks :-)

[Ryan Griggs]

My opinion: this should have been the accepted answer as it lists a command-line option to accomplish exactly the goal, instead of a convoluted set of grep's etc.

[kleinfreund]

How can this be modified so one can write lsx ~/dir that lists contents of a directory that is not the working directory?

[The Quantum Physicist]

This is a stupid solution. Please delete it!

[Steven Pribilinskiy]

I've found a working shorter notation: ls -la|grep ^d;ls -la|grep -v ^d (quotes aren't required and replaced && with ;). Another option is to introduce a variable and then evaluate it: a="ls -la|grep ^d";eval $a;eval $a -v. Could be useful to avoid repetitions when much more options are specified to ls/grep. There's also that ls -la --group-directories-first option, however the shortest imo is ls -la|sort

[kleinfreund]

Since the commands are coupled with && instead of ;, this won’t list contents of directories not containing directories. I posted an explained version as an answer for reference.

[Pirx]

@10basetom: Quick question: How do you get the different colors for the columns in ls? I can color file names by filetype using ls --color, but I don't see a way to get those helpful colors for the columns. What's the secret?

[Ričardas Sabaliauskas]

@Pirx I believe the columns are colored by the default Stack Exchange syntax highlighting :-).

[Pirx]

Yep, that seems to be the case, but it's a great idea, and solutions are in ;-)

[Ričardas Sabaliauskas]

@Pirx I suppose you can convert this into a function and try one of the answers in stackoverflow.com/questions/20151601/…

[Cecil Curry]

I'm in partial agreement with @TheQuantumPhysicist. Given the existence of the GNU-specific --group-directories-first option and the triviality of installing the GNU flavour of ls under macOS, this is an appallingly fragile answer guaranteed to both break under common edge cases and fail to support arbitrary ls options and arguments (e.g., --color=auto). That said, this answer shouldn't be deleted; it should simply be ignored. Yet another quaint, overly antiquated relic of a thankfully bygone era! See this answer for a truly robust solution.

[xaa]

note that filenames & directory starting with uppercase will be list on top with these commands.

[Chris]

+1 so glad I kept reading after the accepted answer

[Danijel]

How to color the output?

[jasonleonhard]

You might also consider adding these aliases

[jasonleonhard]

alias folders='ls -lap | grep "/"'

[jasonleonhard]

alias files='ls -lap | grep -v "/"'

[mschr]

+1 staying with ls keeps control of LS_COLORS too and the grep will remove color codes

[Markus Bawidamann]

Hey, so suuuuuper easy to type and very easy to remember! ;-)