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Stephen Watkins
Asked: 2012-03-11 10:37:26 +0800 CST

How do I exclude directories when listing files?

  • 772

How do I exclude directories when listing files in the current directory?

ls .

^ will include directories in the listing.

ubuntu shell ls

8 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try this one:

    find . -maxdepth 1 -not -type d
    • 29

  2. To get it exactly equivalent to ls . you need to not show hidden dirs.

    find . -maxdepth 1 -not -type d -and -not -name '.*'

    and that still leaves you with './' prefixed to each filename. That's not really an issue, but I think it's kinda ugly. I went with:

    ls -p | grep -v '/$'

    And that will get you a listing that looks the same, and you can add additional ls arguments too. Add a --color=always and you'll get your dircolors back, or -a to see hidden files.

    I like Alexander's answer because he's actually depending on a filesystem characteristic of the file in question so it won't get fooled ever. My answer will get fooled by a file that has a '/' as the last character in it's name. But that seems like it's asking for trouble.

    • 23

  3. try this:

    $ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f

    or this:

    $ ls -p | egrep -v /$

    $ ls -la | egrep -v ^d

    • 5

  4. Though it's an old post, but i thought this might help..

    $ ls -l |grep -v ^d

    It will list all the files including symlinks,character and block files.

    • 4

  5. The "find" solutions above lose some of the capabilities of ls - for example: list only files, sorted in descending modification time.

    The "ls -p | grep" answers do not elegantly deal with other elements of ls such as -R should they be desired

    The following answer, while more verbose, in my opinion reflects the truest ls behaviour and most flexibility for selecting "files only"

    ls -t . | while read line; do
  if [ -f $line ]; then
    echo $line
  fi 
done

    Simply replace the ls switches as desired and the result will be returned with files only. If links and other items are also required then minor rework would need to be done to the test for inclusion.

    • 3 
  6. ls $(file --no-pad  -F' '  * | grep -v directory | cut -d' ' -f1)

    With this you can still use any other options ls usually takes. Or... remove -v to list only directories. Or... replace directory with any other filetype that file understands and reports, like ASCII, empty, ELF, and so on.

    • 0

  7. I was on a system where the find binary did not support -not and I ended up using: 

    ls|while read f;do [ -f "$f" ]&& echo $f;done

    Advantages: Does not rely on anything other than sh ls echo
    Is compatible with bash and dash
    Can be changed to match other things, (such as directories) by changing -f
    Is fastest than some of the answers and uses less RAM and CPU

    • 0

  8. ls -pd $PWD/* |grep -v /$ |xargs ls -l --color=always

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