When I first started writing about the output of the ls command, I didn’t expect it would take four posts to get through, but here we are. We’re almost to the end, the only things left to talk about are the file size, the last modified time, and the filename.

The file size is represented in bytes, unless you pass the -h flag to ls in which case, the size will be displayed in Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte, Petabyte, and Exabyte, depending on how much stuff you have!

For example:

$ cd Downloads
$ ls -lrth
-rw-r--r--  1 gabe  gabe   3.1G Sep 18  2014 loebolus-data-master.zip
-rw-r--r--  1 gabe  gabe   200K Sep 20  2014 bootstrap-3.2.0-dist.zip
-rw-r-----  1 gabe  gabe   3.1M Sep 21  2014 phpunit.phar
-rw-r-----  1 gabe  gabe   153B Sep 21  2014 submit.php

Here we see (G)igabytes, (K)ilobytes, (M)egabytes, and (B)ytes respectively.

We can also see that these files were last modified in September of 2014. If I were to make a change to any of those files, or use the touch command to update their modified time to now, that would be reflected in the output of ls:

$ touch phpunit.phar
$ ls -lrth
-rw-r--r--  1 gabe  gabe   3.1G Sep 18  2014 loebolus-data-master.zip
-rw-r--r--  1 gabe  gabe   200K Sep 20  2014 bootstrap-3.2.0-dist.zip
-rw-r-----  1 gabe  gabe   153B Sep 21  2014 submit.php
-rw-r-----  1 gabe  gabe   3.1M Feb 13 22:12 phpunit.phar

Finally, we have the name of the file that we’re looking at. Hopefully that one is self-explanatory!

That concludes the long tour of the ls command. Next time I’ll be sharing some tips and tricks for using your shell more efficiently.

New Terms

ls -lrth

list the contents of the directory in (l)ong format, (r)everse order, sorted by (t)ime, with sizes in (h)uman readable format. This is probably my most frequently used format of the ls command, as it shows me the most recently changed files at the bottom of the screen.

Bit

a one or a zero

Byte

8 Bits

Kilobyte

1024 Bytes

Megabyte

1024 Kilobytes

Gigabyte

1024 Megabytes

Terabyte

1024 Gigabytes

Petabyte

1024 Terabytes

Exabyte

1024 Petabytes

There are multiple notations for Kilobytes etc, which you can read more about here.