On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 07:10:03PM -0800, Alexander Poquet wrote: ... > Apropos, I have a question: frequently I am in a directory (such as /dev, > for example) which has more stuff in it than I can see in one screenful. > Normally I pipe it through less, but am bothered by the 'one file per > line'-isms that ls spits out in this case. I understand the necessity > of this behaviour, but I was wondering, is there some option which > forces columnated output regardless of the presence of a filter? -C > is documented as column-formatting, but it is ignored in a pipe.
Strange, here it works as advertised. What does "type ls" show? Is it a genuine ls or some build-in degenerate from your shell? Here I get: $ type ls ls is hashed (/bin/ls) $ ls --version ls (GNU fileutils) 4.0l $ dir /usr/bin | head -n 2 822-date grepmail.DP popauth GET grodvi popclient $ ls -C /usr/bin | head -n 2 822-date grepmail.DP popauth GET grodvi popclient $ ls --format=vertical /usr/bin | head -n 2 822-date grepmail.DP popauth GET grodvi popclient $ ls --format=horizontal /usr/bin | head -n 2 822-date GET HEAD Mail MakeTeXPK POST > In a related question, can one force sort by rows instead of by > columns, ie, "a b c\nd e f" instead of "a c e\nb d f"? I say related > because when viewing copious output through a pager, it would be > useful to have sort by rows instead of by columns, which is the default > behaviour. $ ls --format=horizontal -- groetjes, carel
