•  22-08-2019
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Question

Can you sort an ls listing by name?

Was it helpful?

Solution

My ls sorts by name by default. What are you seeing?

man ls states:

List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default). Sort entries alpha‐betically if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort is specified.:

OTHER TIPS

For something simple, you can combine ls with sort. For just a list of file names:
ls -1 | sort

To sort them in reverse order:
ls -1 | sort -r

ls from coreutils performs a locale-aware sort by default, and thus may produce surprising results in some cases (for instance, %foo will sort between bar and quux in LANG=en_US). If you want an ASCIIbetical sort, use

LANG=C ls

The beauty of *nix tools is you can combine them:

ls -l | sort -k9,9

The output of ls -l will look like this

-rw-rw-r-- 1 luckydonald luckydonald  532 Feb 21  2017 Makefile
-rwxrwxrwx 1 luckydonald luckydonald 4096 Nov 17 23:47 file.txt

So with 9,9 you sort column 9 up to the column 9, being the file names. You have to provide where to stop, which is the same column in this case. The columns start with 1.

Also, if you want to ignore upper/lower case, add --ignore-case to the sort command.

NOTICE: "a" comes AFTER "Z":

$ touch A.txt aa.txt Z.txt

$ ls

A.txt Z.txt aa.txt

Files being different only by a numerical string can be sorted on this number at the condition that it is preceded by a separator.

In this case, the following syntax can be used:

ls -x1 file | sort -t'<char>' -n -k2

Example:

ls -1 TRA*log | sort -t'_' -n -k2

TRACE_1.log
TRACE_2.log
TRACE_3.log
TRACE_4.log
TRACE_5.log
TRACE_6.log
TRACE_7.log
TRACE_8.log
TRACE_9.log
TRACE_10.log

From the man page (for bash ls):

Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuSUX nor --sort.

Check your .bashrc file for aliases.

The ls utility should conform to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (POSIX.1) which states:

22027: it shall sort directory and non-directory operands separately according to the collating sequence in the current locale.

26027: By default, the format is unspecified, but the output shall be sorted alphabetically by symbol name:

  • Library or object name, if −A is specified
  • Symbol name
  • Symbol type
  • Value of the symbol
  • The size associated with the symbol, if applicable

ls -X works for that purpose, in case you have aliased ls to a more useful default.

In Debian Jessie, this works nice:

ls -lah --group-directories-first

# l=use a long listing format
# a=do not ignore entries starting with .
# h=human readable
# --group-directories-first=(obvious)
# Note: add -r for reverse alpha

# You might consider using lh by appending to ~/.bashrc as the alias:
~$ echo "alias lh='ls -lah --group-directories-first'" >>~/.bashrc
# -- restart your terminal before using lh command --
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