UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

Can anyone help me how to change the the o/p of ls -la command under any directory in a pipe | delimited format.

Thanks,
jam

ls -la <Directory Path> | tr "\n" ";"

Regards,
Sasidhar

Hi Sasi,

I dont think so it will work as i required. it will just cat all the lines in to a single line with ; sepated format.
Let me brief my requirement,
if i run ls -la cmd in my current directory o/p look like
drwxrwxr-x 8 ic develop 1024 Nov 15 17:40 ./
drwxrwxr-x 11 ic develop 1024 Nov 15 16:05 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ic develop 236 Nov 15 16:05 avg.sh*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ic develop 1416 Nov 15 16:05 bak
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ic develop 2702 Nov 15 16:05 bak2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ic develop 0 Nov 15 16:05 batch
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ic develop 37 Nov 15 16:05 bigfile
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ic develop 313 Nov 15 16:05 bintooct*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ic develop 16184 Nov 15 16:05 cat_def
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ic develop 426 Nov 15 16:05 chessboard*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ic develop 211 Nov 15 16:05 chk*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ic develop 315 Nov 15 16:05 decimaltobinary*
drwxrwxr-x 3 ic develop 512 Nov 15 17:39 excer/
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ic develop 196 Nov 15 16:05 fact.sh*

i wanted to convert this mutiple, inconsistace spaces with "|" o/p should like

-rwxr-xr-x|1|ic|develop|196|Nov|15|16:05|fact.sh*

can it be done using single command in shell?

thanks,
jam

this will do

Code:

ls -al | awk '{ for(i=1; i<=9; i++) { printf "%s|", $i } printf "\n" } '

ls -la | sed -n 's/ */|/gp'

or

ls -la | sed -n 's/ [ \t]*/|/gp'

Cheers
rex

I doubt your first command regarding the o/p required

its much of delimiting each and every character of ls -la and not the words

This is why we need code tags! The command is

Code:

$ ls -la | sed 's/  */|/g'

We need 2 spaces in the sed command. nilesrex probably typed both spaces but they are combined without code tags.

nilesrex used -n and put a p and the end of the substitute command. This will have the effect of supressing any lines that did not have some spaces to convert. There won't be any lines like that with my version of ls so I used the more simple command.