ls Shortcuts: ll, lf, lg, etc.

The old 4.1BSD UNIX system I worked on in the early 1980s had commands named ll, for ls -l; lf, for ls -F; and lm, for the (defunct, on BSD at least... RIP) ls -m command. [For those of us who don't remember it, ls -m listed files separated by commas, rather than spaces. -ML ] When they left my system, I made my own shell script to do the same things. If your system doesn't have these, you can install the script from the tutorial.

This is the single script file for all the commands:

#! /bin/sh case $0 in *lf) exec ls -F "$@";; *lg) exec ls -lg "$@";; *ll) exec ls -l "$@";; *lm) ls "$@" | awk '{ if ((length($0) + 2 + length(inline)) > 79) {
 print inline "," inline = $0
}
else if (length(inline) != 0) inline = inline ", " $0 else # this is the first filename inline = $0
}
END {
 print inline }' ;; *lr) exec ls -lR "$@";; *) echo "$0: Help! Shouldn't get here!" 1>&2; exit 1;; esac

The exec () command saves a process - this was important on my overloaded VAX 11/750, and doesn't hurt on faster systems.

You can install this script from the tutorial or just type it in. If you type it into a file named lf, don't forget to make the four other links (): lg, ll, lm, and lr. The script tests the name it was called with, in $0, to decide which ls command to run. This trick saves disk space.

System V still has the -m option, so you can replace the *lm) section with plain ls -m. Also, on some UNIXes, the ls -g option does nothing; replace that section with ls -lG or ls -lo. You can add other commands, too, by adding a line to the case and another link. (For more on shell developing, start with article .)

- JP