Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Listing Files and Directories

In Chapter 3, “Working with Files,” you looked at using the ls command to list the files in the current directory. Now let's look at using the ls command to list the files in any directory.

Listing Directories

To list the files in a directory, you can use the following syntax:

ls dir
						

Here, dir is the absolute or relative pathname of the directory whose contents you want listed.

For example, both of the following commands will list the contents of the directory /usr/local (assuming that the working directory is /home/ranga):

$ ls /usr/local
$ ls ../../usr/local

On my system, the listing resembles

X11           bin           gimp          jikes         sbin
ace           doc           include       lib           share
atalk         etc           info          man           turboj-1.1.0

The listing on your system might ...