Shell – List Only Regular Files in Current Directory

fileslsshellwildcards

I can use ls -ld */ to list all the directory entries in the current directory. Is there a similarly easy way to just list all the regular files in the current directory? I know I can use find

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f

or stat

stat -c "%F %n" * | grep "regular file" | cut -d' ' -f 3-

but these do not strike me as being overly elegant. Is there a nice short way to list only the regular files (I don't care about devices, pipes, etc.) but not the sub-directories of the current directory? Listing symbolic links as well would be a plus, but is not a necessity.

Best Answer

With zsh and Glob Qualifiers you can easily express it directly, e.g:

echo *(.)

will either only return the list of regular files or an error depending on your configuration.

For the non-directories:

echo *(^/)

(will include symlinks (including to directories), named pipes, devices, sockets, doors...)

echo *(-.)

for regular files and symlinks to regular files.

echo *(-^/)

for non-directories and no symlinks to directories either.

Also, see the D globbing qualifier if you want to include Dot files (hidden files), like *(D-.).

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