UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello everyone,
I just began studying solaris 10. I have tried searching for the meaning of this command (ls -la ). Can anyone please explain to me what the command

ls -la

does?
example ls -la /etc

Thank you

The -a flag means to show all files, including those starting with a full stop, e.g. .profile which many version of ls exclude. This makes them sort of hidden.

Read the man page for more information.


I hope that this helps

Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

When logged into the computer, take a look at the online manual.

Code:

man ls

In this case the default action of just typing ls on its own has been modified by adding two switches "-l" and "-a". This can be specified as:

Code:

ls -l -a
# Or in short
ls -la

Thanks Methyl for the explanation. Now understand that its two switches combined as one. However, I do not understand the -l option and what it is supposed to do. I checked the man ls but could not find the ls -l . Can you explain what the ls -l does?

Thanks again

Time to learn how to find things in "man".
Sometimes you just have to trawl from the top down, but there are some tricks. The "man" pages are presented to you by a "pager" program which is often the "more" command or something like it. These "pager" programs contain basic search facilities.
So, to find -l in man ls I typed /-l a couple of times until I found what I wanted to read.
You'll also note that the command switches are in alphabetic order in the manual.

Thanks boss. Lots