I put this here because it is a 'behavior' type question..
I seem to remember doing ls .* and getting all the .-files, like
.profile
.login

etc.

But ls .* doesn't do that, it lsts the contents of every .*-type subdirectory.

Is it supposed to?
I should think that a -R should be given to dive into subdirs?
All I have access to are Solaris, BSD and Linux, what is with the others?

Atle

If I understand you question correctly

Your ls .* is finding the two directories . & .. (your current directory & the one a step back up the hierarchy)

use ls -d .* to supress printing the contents of these.

Not as bad as that, it is not going up, but down.
It is printing all the stuff in .xauth, .netscape, etc.
Thanks, that did it.
Alias set up instantly

When you type "ls .*", what is happening is that your shell is expanding the "*" to ".sh_history .netscape/ .profile .blah .less/" and everything else starting with a ".".

The -d flag tells ls not to go into the directories, like it would if you did it the way above.

I have a very usefull alias:

alias l.='ls -ld .[a-zA-Z0-9]*'

so when I type "l.", it gives me a long listing of all the dot-files and directories without going into them, and without listing "." and "..".

Thanks, LivinFree, that's exactly what I was looking for, even better than just stupidly aliasing ls itself!

L miss those l, lc and ll and whatever they wre called. You reminded me to make them!


If you want to have some more fun, I'm setting up a 'hackers corner' (hacker in the true sense of the word, of course, not as in 'intruder') at

http://atle.linux-site.net

it is a little cryptic, so it actually goes like this
/cgi-bin/signon.cgi - signon
/cgi-bin/manager.cgi - manage

For the kind of people mention belov Unix only

That is: and

Atle

I never knew I would miss ll and the others until I used HP-UX for the first time... Now, the first thing I do on a new system is set up my ls alias' !

Here's some other helpful ones:

alias lr='ls -ltr'
lsd () { ls -l $@|grep "^d" ; }
alias emode='set -o emacs'
alias vmode='set -o vi'

Boy, do I love Unix!

& amen 2 that

Not to start a shell war, but what is your favourite shell?
I've sort of rediscovered csh these days, it's really a shame that it seems to be losing out.

if ($< == "q") echo "yes"

is sort of 'natural' to a C programmer ...