How do I list only source code files when I type ls on OSX?

Question

when I type ls, I don't want to see .o files because everytime I ls, It see X.cpp X.h X.o, how do I not list .o files?

Answer 1

OS X's BSD ls does not support the -I argument present in GNU ls to filter file types.

You can run the following expression that returns all files in the current directory that don't have a .o extension, and otherwise prints the same format as ls -l:

find * -maxdepth 0 ! -name '*.o' -print0 | xargs -0 ls -dl

You can create a function for this in your ~/.zprofile so you can run it by typing lso <extension>:

function lso {
    find * -maxdepth 0 ! -name "*.$1" -print0 | xargs -0 ls -dl
}

It's not suitable as a complete ls substitute, as it doesn't support arguments.

Sample output:

$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 danielbeck  staff    0  2 Sep 12:52 pi.c
-rw-r--r--  1 danielbeck  staff    0  2 Sep 12:52 pi.o
-rw-r--r--  1 danielbeck  staff  278 31 Aug 06:52 pi.py
-rw-r--r--  1 danielbeck  staff    0  2 Sep 12:52 pi.pyc

$ lso
-rw-r--r--  1 danielbeck  staff    0  2 Sep 12:52 pi.c
-rw-r--r--  1 danielbeck  staff  278 31 Aug 06:52 pi.py
-rw-r--r--  1 danielbeck  staff    0  2 Sep 12:52 pi.pyc

Answer 2

If you've setopt extended_glob, you can do something like ls -ld ^*.o and maybe assign that to an alias of your choice.

Answer 3

@cYrus is correct that the BSD ls -I ... filter option is not supported. However here's a quick-and-dirty hack that postprocesses ls -F output to exclude directories, symbolic links, sockets, whiteouts, FIFOs:

ls -1F | grep -v '[/@=%|]'

(Note: obviously this relies on assuming those special characters don't occur in filenames, which is not 100% reliable like a find-based approach.)