mjhjmtu

Here is outpu of ls -al command:

total 280K
drwxrwxr-x 2 enan enan 4.0K Jun 28 09:59 ranger/
drwxrwxr-x 2 enan enan 4.0K Jun 8 23:26 scripts/
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 49 Jun 4 18:19 caps_to_ctrl.sh
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 739 Jun 4 18:19 cmus.theme
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 8.6K Jun 4 18:19 compton.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 5.9K Jun 22 09:39 config
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 859 Jun 14 12:13 i3blocks.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 4.7K Jun 14 12:13 init.el
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 8.7K Jun 28 11:22 init.vim
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 815 Jun 14 12:13 install.sh
-rwxrwxr-x 1 enan enan 142 Jun 4 18:19 lock.sh*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 1.1K Jun 21 13:30 README.md
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 197K Jun 14 12:13 screenshot.png
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 1.2K Jun 20 21:51 Session.vim
-rw-rw-r-- 1 enan enan 427 Jun 9 13:46 tmux.sh

You can see there is a number between the file permissions -rw-rw-r-- and file owner enan. That number is the number of hard links of the file. Showing that in the output might be useful for some cases but right now, I don't need it and it distracts me sometimes. You can see, I had a way to remove the last modified date from the output of ls -al because I don't need it right now.

So, how can I remove the number of hard links from the output of ls -al command? And what is the importance of having the number of hard links and last modified date being shown in the output of the command? I mean, if any of you use those info, tell me why and how you do so, cause I don't wanna unintentionally shadow a behavior that I should use.

If you don't want to see the links which are in the second column then you can pipe ls -al into awk to remove it:

ls -al | awk '$2=""; print $0'

That will print all but the second column using the standard delimiter in this case which is a space.

In my environment, the columns for the last modified date are 6, 7, and 8 using space as the delimiter so to get rid of them and the second column:

ls -la | awk '$2=$6=$7=$8=""; print $0'

If you don't need or want to see some of the columns then you can use the syntax above as a model to remove whichever ones you desire. It's not going to hurt anything. If you just want to see all the columns as not to miss anything then use the standard:

ls -al

If you want an alias, add the following to ~/.bashrc:

la() 
 ls -la 

That's a function that behaves in the same way without having to account for and escape the single and double quotes. I used la as ll gives a syntax error as it's already an alias in my environment.

To remove the hard link count from the output of ls -l while still leaving the rest of the line intact:

ls -l | sed -E '2,$s/ +[0-9]+//'

The sed substitution will remove the first set of digits and any space before it on each line after the first line (the first line contains the total).

As a function

myls () sed -E '2,$s/ +[0-9]+//'

This function invokes ls -l with any other command line arguments given by the user to the function before sending the result through sed.

By using command ls, we ensure that, if you later decide to rename the function into ls, the function would not call itself recursively.

Example:

$ ls -la ~/.skel
total 18
drwxr-xr-x 2 kk wheel 512 May 4 16:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 kk wheel 512 Jun 28 08:15 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 87 Nov 1 2017 .Xdefaults
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 771 Feb 9 10:18 .cshrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 101 Nov 1 2017 .cvsrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 359 Nov 1 2017 .login
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 175 Nov 1 2017 .mailrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 229 May 4 16:29 .profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 108 Apr 15 12:50 .vimrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk wheel 0 Apr 21 17:44 .zshrc

$ myls -a ~/.skel
total
drwxr-xr-x kk wheel 512 May 4 16:29 .
drwxr-xr-x kk wheel 512 Jun 28 08:15 ..
-rw-r--r-- kk wheel 87 Nov 1 2017 .Xdefaults
-rw-r--r-- kk wheel 771 Feb 9 10:18 .cshrc
-rw-r--r-- kk wheel 101 Nov 1 2017 .cvsrc
-rw-r--r-- kk wheel 359 Nov 1 2017 .login
-rw-r--r-- kk wheel 175 Nov 1 2017 .mailrc
-rw-r--r-- kk wheel 229 May 4 16:29 .profile
-rw-r--r-- kk wheel 108 Apr 15 12:50 .vimrc
-rw-r--r-- kk wheel 0 Apr 21 17:44 .zshrc

A variation of the function that acts exactly like ls unless you use ls -l:

ls () (
 add_filter=0
 while getopts ':l' opt; do
 case $opt in
 l) add_filter=1 ;;
 1) add_filter=0
 esac
 done

 command ls "$@" | 
 if [ "$add_filter" -eq 1 ]; then
 sed -E '2,$s/ +[0-9]+//'
 else
 cat
 fi
)

The function does its own command line parsing to detect whether the -l option was used (and also not later disabled through the use of -1). If it was, we set a flag. Later, if the flag was set, we filter the output of ls through sed. If the flag wasn't set, we just pass the output as-is through cat.

With ast-open's ls (also the builtin ls of ksh93 if it has been included and /opt/ast/bin is ahead of /bin in $PATH), you can fully specify the output format and omit the number of links (%3(nlink)u) there:

ls -rSZ '%(mode)s %-8(uid)s %-8(gid)s %8(device:case::%(size)u:*:%(device)s)s %(atime)s %(name)s%(linkop:case:?*: %(linkop)s %(linkpath)s)s'