Does ‘ls’ ignore Zsh glob sorting qualifiers

macoszsh

I try to understand how to use Zsh glob qualifiers with ls.

An article on the internet says that to sort the files from largest to smallest, I can use ls *(oL).

o<sort> – Sort files depending on the value of <sort>

O<sort> – Like o, but sort in descending order

The value of <sort> can be:

n – Sort by name (the default).

L – Sort by size.

l – Sort by number of links.

a – Sort by last access.

m – Sort by last modification.

c – Sort by last inode change.

d – Files in subdirectories appear before.

N – Don’t sort anything.

For example:
# Sort files from the smallest to the largest
ls *(oL)

But ls *(oL) doesn't list files in this way for me, ls *(On) doesn't list files in reverse alphabetical order, ls *(om) doesn't sort files by modification date (and there is no difference if you run ls *(Om)). All the commands list files in regular alphabetical order, from A to Z, and that's it. It seems ls ignores Zsh globs?

I should say that in other situations Zsh globs seems to work correctly for me. For example, print -rC1 *(.) prints only files, without directories.

zsh 5.9 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0)

Best Answer

ls does its own sorting. To disable that, and display the files as they are given (by the glob expansion), use -f on macOS:

ls -f *(oL)

To list directories without listing their contents, add -d. For single-column output, add -1.

Related Solutions

Disable glob qualifiers in zsh

You can disable the PATTERN(QUALIFIERS) syntax by unsetting the bare_glob_qual option:

setopt no_bare_glob_qual

If the option extended_glob is set (and you should set it, the only reason not to set it is for backward compatibility with rare scripts that use unusual syntax), then there is another syntax for glob qualifiers: PATTERN(#qQUALIFIERS). So you can still use glob qualifiers, which are one of zsh's killer features, but you'll have to type a bit more.

Zsh lets you disable wildcard expansion (globbing) altogether, and this looks like a better choice for you. If a command is prefixed by noglob, then no globbing is performed on its arguments. For example, to be able to type URLs containing ? as arguments to wget, I have alias wget='noglob wget'. If you set alias ag='noglob ag', you can type ag mymethod(param).

If ag takes both a search pattern and file names as arguments, then disabling globbing is not good. If you're able to parse the arguments of ag, then you can perform wildcard expansion on them. I don't know the syntax of ag, so I'll give an example where I assume that ag only takes options that don't take arguments, and that its first non-option argument is a pattern and the rest are files.

ag () {
local i=1
  while [[ ${(P)i} = -* ]]; do ((++i)); done
  if ((i < $#)); then
    set -- "${(@)@[1,$i]}" $~@[$((i+1)),$#]
  fi
}
alias ag='noglob ag'

Zsh: menu completion for glob

% PS1='%% ' exec zsh -f
% autoload -U compinit && compinit
% setopt GLOB_COMPLETE
% touch aa ab ac ad
% vim a*

Will cycle through the options; and then for a menu (on, like, everything)

% zstyle ':completion*:default' menu 'select=0'
% vim a*

For more information see zshoptions(1) and the "From Bash to Z Shell" book for slightly readable docs on the completion system.

Menu completion on demand would require a custom widget:

function blaah {
  local revert
  revert=0
  if [[ $options[(k)globcomplete] = off ]]; then
    setopt globcomplete
    revert=1
  fi
  zle menu-expand-or-complete
  if [[ $revert -eq 1 ]]; then
    unsetopt globcomplete
  fi
}
zle -N blaah

# or perhaps additionally 'vicmd' or instead 'emacs', depending
binkey -M viins "^W" blaah

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Disable glob qualifiers in zsh

Zsh: menu completion for glob

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