CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ls
george
george

Reputation: 191

How can I order ls command display in numerical order?

I created three files in a directory with the following names:

11 13 9

The problem: As I created file 9 after 13, it is placed after file 13 when I do the ls command.

How can I make the ls command sort the files in the numerical order, like in the following?

9 11 13

Upvotes: 16

Views: 16488

Answers (4)

Sam
Sam

Reputation: 6620

If you're on macOS where, as @eris points out, -v isn't supported, you can pipe the output to sort to achieve what you want:

ls -1 | sort -n

Note that's the digit 1, not a lowercase L.

ls -1 lists one file per line, but without the additional columns of -l. This makes it suitable for piping into sort, where -n is a shorthand for --numeric-sort: "compare according to string numerical value"

Upvotes: 0

Chem-man17
Chem-man17

Reputation: 1770

Look at the man page for ls.

From there-

-v natural sort of (version) numbers within text.

You'll find that the command ls -v does what you want.

If you want the file names on different lines then you can do ls -1v.

Upvotes: 24

Mateusz Piotrowski
Mateusz Piotrowski

Reputation: 9157

Unfortunately, ls -v on macOS and FreeBSD does not perform a natural sort on the list of files. FreeBSD ls does not support this flag at all. On macOS it can be used to

force unedited printing of non-graphic characters; this is the default when output is not to a terminal.

If you badly need the GNU extension of -v to the ls utility, you can install the GNU ls and then use alias ls=gls to use the GNU ls instead of the default ls. GNU ls usually comes with the coreutils package, so, e.g.,

  • On macOS: brew install coreutils
  • On FreeBSD: pkg install coreutils

Upvotes: 3

eris
eris

Reputation: 3

List with lines without columns:

ls -x

Using tr to avoid multiple lines output:

ls | tr "\n" " "

And to ensure to accurately force ascending order:

ls -v | tr "\n" " "

Some useful and essential information from linux.org about ls.

Upvotes: 0

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