Simplify Terminal directory listings

05.06.2009
As someone who spends a fair bit of time in Terminal, I'm always looking for handy timesaving Unix tips. A great source of such information is , a site where users contribute their favorite tips. Much of what you'll find there may not be directly applicable to OS X--as the site covers all versions of Unix and Linux--but a lot of it is.

After a command is submitted, other users can vote the submission up or down, based on how well they think it works. By focusing on the highly-rated submissions, you can quickly collect a good number of useful commands. To make this weeding-out process easier, commandlinefu.com has RSS and Twitter feeds for tips with a minimum of three "up" votes (, ) or ten "up" votes (, ). I use the 10-up Twitter feed, and it's a great way to only see the really popular submissions.

Today's 10-up Tweet featured a simple improvement to the ls -al command. This command lists all files in long format, and the output is quite verbose:

$ ls -l

total 0

drwx------@ 13 robg staff 442 Jun 5 09:23 Desktop