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How can I tweak the output of ls in Linux so that it looks like the output of the command dir /b /s in Windows?

dir /b /s output as follows:

C:\MinGW>dir /s /b 
C:\MinGW\COPYING 
C:\MinGW\COPYING.LIB
C:\MinGW\doc 
C:\MinGW\include
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 4 '10 at 20:23

5 Answers

up vote 3 down vote 
find . -print

This should produce the same output as dir /s/b

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Not quite. The paths are displayed relative to ., not /. find BACKTICKpwdBACKTICK -print would work. But that's a bit more complicated than just using ls and I don't think exact conformance to dir's output format is a strict requirement. – sepp2k Jul 4 '10 at 20:33
@sepp2k: Given your last sentence, I'm confused why you point out the first. Find is a generally much more useful tool than ls for cases similar to this. – Roger Pate Jul 4 '10 at 23:29
@jrtokarz: You don't need the dot or -print, they're the default, so just "find". – Roger Pate Jul 4 '10 at 23:30
@Roger: I believe the search path is required in most find versions (except GNU). – grawity Jul 5 '10 at 10:19
up vote 2 down vote

ls -R lists all files and subdirectories recursively. With ls -R1 you get the same, but only one file per line.

Neither makes the output look exactly like that of dir /b /s, but it should be close enough.

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up vote 1 down vote 
ls -1

or

ls -1d "$PWD"/*
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/S is the dir equivalent of -R even if the OP's example output does not make that clear. – sepp2k Jul 4 '10 at 20:27
ls -1 does not work recursively (as required). ls -1R would work recursively, but its output will look quite different to dir /s /b (which shows the absolute paths for each file). ls -1d "${PWD}/* also misses two things: the recursion and matching normal files (your -d limits output to directories only). – – Kurt Pfeifle Jul 5 '10 at 13:22
up vote 1 down vote

It depends, how hard the requirement is to get "equivalence" to dir /b /s... These ones come pretty close (they'll have no backslashes as directory separator though, and the output order will be a bit different [dir /b /s outputs 'sibling' directories first, before diving into each one to show their content]). The second one is just a fallback in case your version find doesn't default to -print action (most do though):

find $(pwd)
find $(pwd) -print

UPDATE: I had a typo in above commands originally. I typed curly brackets "{}" instead of round ones "()" how they ought to be. Thanks to grawity for spotting this.

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1  
It's $PWD, uppercase. – grawity Jul 5 '10 at 10:20
@grawity: you're right and wrong at the same time. $PWD or ${PWD} would return the content of an environment variable (the current directory). This is what you have in mind. pwd is a little commandline utility ('print working directory') which also outputs the current directory path. Using it as ${pwd} or as `pwd` would return the result of that command, which in this case has the same effect as using $PWD. So my version will definitely work, and your comment was not appropriate in this context. – Kurt Pfeifle Jul 5 '10 at 10:33
2  
Correction: $(pwd) returns output of pwd, and ${pwd} returns the value of $pwd. Notice the difference in brackets. – grawity Jul 5 '10 at 10:43
@grawity: D'oh! You're right of course. (I do it right whenever I need to do it in a shell. Heaven knows why I did it wrong when typing it into the text edit field....) I'll correct my comments so it will not confuse other readers. – Kurt Pfeifle Jul 5 '10 at 13:13
up vote 1 down vote

this seems to work, from the command line:

find|awk "/^\.\//{print\"$PWD\"substr(\$0,2)}"
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Why would you not just use -printf instead? – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Oct 30 '10 at 10:13
Because I'm new and do things the hard way. I've added this line to my .bashrc which seems to do the trick: alias lsb='find . -printf "$PWD/%P\n"' Is this what you mean? Thanks for the tip! – erik Oct 30 '10 at 20:02

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