UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

If the idea is just to use tr to translate ls -l output spaces and tabs separating fields into single tab characters, you can try:

Code:

ls -l|tr -s '[:blank:]' '\t'|cut -f 1,3,4,9

which should do what you want as long as none of your filenames contain whitespace characters (i.e., spaces, tabs, or newlines). But, stat might be more reliable and just needs one command instead of a three stage pipeline:

Code:

stat -f '%Sp%t%Su%t%Sg%t%N' *

which should do what you want unless you have a lot of files in your directory with enough long filenames to overflow ARG_MAX limits.

And, if you could have large numbers of files some of which have names that contain space or tab characters (but not newlines) you could always feed the ls output through sed:

Code:

ls -l|sed 's/\([^[:blank:]]*\)[[:blank:]]*[0-9]*[[:blank:]]*\([^[:blank:]]*\)[[:blank:]]*\([^[:blank:]]*\)\([[:blank:]]*[^[:blank:]]*\)\{4\} /\1        \2      \3      /'

where those are literal tab characters after the \1, \2, and \3 in the replacement text of the substitute command to get exactly what you want no matter how many files are present in the directory.

Note that in all of these I used the blank character class instead of just using a space character in these patterns and BREs because I'm not sure whether ls ever uses tab characters to reduce the number of characters it writes while lining up output fields.

With a while loop:

Code:

ls -l | while read perm _ user group _ _ _ _ fname; do printf -- "$perm $user $group $fname\n"; done

Nice. This also works as long as there are no <newline> characters in any of the filenames in the current directory (and there are no <percent-sign> characters in any of the filenames). You can get rid of the <percent-sign> problem by changing the printf command in the loop to:

Code:

printf '%s %s %s %s\n' "$perm" "$user" "$group" "$fname"

if you want <space>s between fields or to:

Code:

printf '%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\n' "$perm" "$user" "$group" "$fname"

if you want <tab>s between fields.