Monday man page: ls

There are two kinds of Mac folk: them that finds this "Terminal" thing strangely fascinating, and them what co iders it the worst kind of wicked magic, not to be trifled with. Here at TUAW we've got all kinds, and for anyone who might be curious about the power and po ibilities of the command line, we're going to provide some weekly quick ti and suggestio for introductory use. Always keep in mind, though, that the damage you can do from Terminal is effectively unlimited, e ecially with administrative acce . Best to play around in a 'dummy' account until you have your sea legs.

Even before we start, an explanation of the title: 'man pages' are the D UNIX manuals, already tucked away on your Mac. You can type "man < an style="font-style: italic;">command" in Terminal for a detailed (not to say overwhelming) rundown on any command-line tool. As we've mentioned before, an excellent intro to Terminal in Tiger can be found over at the O'Reilly Mac Dev Center. We also posted about Unix for the Begi ing Mage, an amusing begi er's guide to the plumbing under Mac OS X.

Our fine feathered friend today is 'ls' -- the UNIX directory list command. Read on for more...The 'ls' command will, in basic form, list the contents of a directory. Type 'ls ~/Desktop' sa quotes in Terminal, and get a readout of the files on your Desktop:

Last login: Mon Dec 18 00:02:44 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
MTR-iMac-242:~ miker$ ls ~/Desktop
Desktop 20060904        MacHeist ?? Bundle Receipt.pdf
Desktop 20061217        TuneTalk.JPG

"Cool bea ," you say, "but can't I do that from the Finder?" Ye but with some optio , 'ls' can:

• list ALL the files in a directory: 'ls -a ~/Desktop' -- great for finding mystery file C.K. posted about this a while back
  
• give a detailed readout including permi io : 'ls -l' -- or combine with above for all the invisibles and all the permi io : 'ls -la'
  
• see the otherwise-hard-to-find ACLs for a directory or file: 'ls -e'
• sort the file list by modification date, most recent first: 'ls -t'

For the full man page on 'ls' check out the HMUG listing or simply type 'man ls' at the Terminal prompt. It's worth mentioning that 'ls' (unlike some other commands we could mention) is completely nondestructive, so don't panic.