A nice ls alias

david3

Here's a nice "ls" alias for .bashrc

# alias for ls
lss() {
  ls -ald --color "$@" | less -RFX
}

^ Edited to quote the arguments "$@"

With the arguments quoted the "No such file or directory" error gets cut off.

$ lss *blah*
quoted
: No such file or directory

not quoted
ls: cannot access '*blah*': No such file or directory

But, overall it works better if you're passing quotes.

$ lss "test file.txt"
quoted
-rw-rw-r-- 1 david david 5 Oct  8 12:39 test file.txt

not quoted
ls: cannot access 'test': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access 'file.txt': No such file or directory

david3

Ugh, after testing various arguments I forgot to test it without.

This works better.

# alias for ls
lss() {
  if [[ "$@" == "" ]]
  then
    ls -al --color "$@" | less -RFX
  else
    ls -ald --color "$@" | less -RFX
  fi
}

ls -d is helpful when passing a wildcard, so the directory names are listed instead of recursing into directories, but without any arguments it just lists the home directory.

FinCoder

Small improvement: [[ "$@ == " ]] can misbehave with several arguments. Checking the argument count is more robust:

lss() {
if (( $# )); then
ls -ald --color "$@" | less -RFX
else
ls -al --color | less -RFX
fi
}

david3

I find that doesn't quite work, since $# still has a value with no arguments, so it always gets the first option. But this works:

# alias for ls
lss() {
  if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]
  then
    ls -al --color "$@" | less -RFXE
  else
    ls -ald --color "$@" | less -RFXE
  fi
}

Thanks.

arcadia420man

Huge difference between parenthesis and brackets.

echo "testing [[ ]]"
if [[ "0" ]]
then
  echo "0 as a string is true"
fi
echo "testing (( ))"
if (( 0 ))
then
  echo "0 as a number is true"
else
  echo "0 as a number is false"
fi

Also, when using brackets, variables should either be quoted "$var" or expanded with braces ${var}.

david3

Ah, didn't catch that.

XiaoBiXiong

didn't catch that