mjhjmtu

I like the --group-directories-first flag for ls. My .zshrc has this line in it:

alias ls="ls -h --color='auto' --group-directories-first"

The only thing I don't like is that symbolic links to directories don't get grouped with the directories.

Are there any switches I can add to the ls command that will cause symbolic-links-to-directories to group with directories? I'm disinclined to build a compound command, because I like being able to add additional switches to ls on the fly.

One option is to use the -L flag:

-L, --dereference

when showing file information for a symbolic link, show information for the file the link references rather than for the link itself

For example, assume I have the files and directories below:

$ ls -l --group-directories-first
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 2 user group 6 Nov 30 08:19 zdir1
drwxr-xr-x. 2 user group 6 Nov 30 08:19 zdir2
-rw-r--r--. 1 user group 0 Nov 30 08:20 file1
-rw-r--r--. 1 user group 0 Nov 30 08:20 file2
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 user group 5 Nov 30 08:23 symlink -> zdir2

The symlink gets sorted with the directories when -L is used:

$ ls -lL --group-directories-first
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 2 user group 6 Nov 30 08:19 symlink
drwxr-xr-x. 2 user group 6 Nov 30 08:19 zdir1
drwxr-xr-x. 2 user group 6 Nov 30 08:19 zdir2
-rw-r--r--. 1 user group 0 Nov 30 08:20 file1
-rw-r--r--. 1 user group 0 Nov 30 08:20 file2

As you noticed, ls no longer indicates whether the files are symlinks are not. I'm not familiar with a way in ls to show a symlink once it's been dereferenced, but I wrote a hacky bash function to do it for you:

lsd() while read line; do
 file=$(echo "$line" 

Essentially, the script will determine if the file output from ls -lL --group-directories-first is a symlink or not. If it is, the first character is changed to an l, and what the symlink points to is appended to the end of the line.

$ lsd
total 0
lrwxr-xr-x. 2 user group 6 Nov 30 13:49 symlink -> zdir2
drwxr-xr-x. 2 user group 6 Nov 30 13:49 zdir1
drwxr-xr-x. 2 user group 6 Nov 30 13:49 zdir2
-rw-r--r--. 1 user group 0 Nov 30 13:49 file1
-rw-r--r--. 1 user group 0 Nov 30 13:49 file2