MacOS – Making directories list first in terminal with `ls`

macosterminal

Is it possible to make the default of Terminal such that when I use the ls command it lists the directories first and then the files?

I figured out that this can be done by using coreutils and the command gls --group-directories-first, but I was wondering if there was an OS X native way to do this without coreutils.

Best Answer

The short answer is no. The ls shipped with OSX is not the GNU ls therefore it doesn't have the same options.

But you can get a similar result with :

ls -al | sort -k1 -r

Ps: I agree that it's far from perfect :)

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MacOS – How to remove .DS_Store from command-line auto-completion using cd

export FIGNORE=DS_Store works for me.

The GNU Bash manual provides extensive information on programmable completion.

Specifically, from the documentation on bash variables

FIGNORE [is a] colon-separated list of suffixes to ignore when performing filename completion. A file name whose suffix matches one of the entries in FIGNORE is excluded from the list of matched file names. A sample value is ‘.o:~’

If you are concerned that there might be existing suffixes in FIGNORE, then you can use:

export FIGNORE=$FIGNORE:DS_Store

MacOS – Why are the hidden files/directories seen in Terminal color settings

If I understand you correctly, this likely has to do with how terminals work. In bash they are hidden by most aliases of ls.

Try ls -a or \ls -a if that isn't working. This is to show all files and escape an alias you might have.

Put simply, the terminal doesn't care about finder preferences because it isn't finder.

If not, then perhaps terminal simply doesn't respect the finder settings.

Best Answer

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MacOS – How to remove .DS_Store from command-line auto-completion using cd

MacOS – Why are the hidden files/directories seen in Terminal color settings

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