Introduction to VLSI Design

Commonly used UN*X commands: ls

List is one of the primary commands in UN*X. This command lets you view the contents of directories and properties of the files contained within. This command has many options which determine the format of the listing:

	ls
	ls -l

These two are the two most common ones. The first one will just list the files and directories. The second format will produce a long listing, as follows :

 	ls -l

total 294
-rw-r--r--   1 kgf      kgf        16057 Oct  8 16:41 CDS.log
-rw-r--r--   1 kgf      kgf         1845 Sep 30 21:36 DRE_CDS.log
drwxr-xr-x   2 kgf      kgf          512 Oct  5 13:54 ams
drwxr-xr-x   4 kgf      kgf          512 Jul 28 18:11 cadence
drwxr-xr-x   8 kgf      kgf         1536 Oct  8 16:07 cds
-rw-r--r--   1 kgf      kgf         4947 Sep  1 16:39 cksum1.c

The list contains 9 fields for each file or directory. From left to right:

  1. The permissions and type: this rather cryptic field contains information on access rights for that file. The entry is a directory if the first character is a "d".
  2. number of inodes (detail)
  3. The owner of the file
  4. The group of the file
  5. File size in bytes
  6. Month
  7. Day
  8. and time of file creation
  9. Name of the file


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