We have brought a Fedora 8 dedicated server from godaddy. On that "ls -lh" commad is not working. The following are the output of ls -lh
# ls -lh
ls: invalid option -- h
Try `ls --help' for more information.

In man page of ls and ls in "ls-- help " there is the option -h. But not working that.
We haven't done any modification on the machine. Anybody know how I get the proper output of "ls -lh"

Thanking you,
Nikesh

are you using BASH?

I just did ls -lh, and it works fine, so maybe you are in a different shell---Do "env | grep SHELL" or "echo $SHELL" to see what you are using.

Ummmmm---you said you checked the man page, so my idea may be off-base. Also look at aliases (Just enter "alias" in a terminal)

Thanks for the reply.

I am using Bash shell.
Also i checked the aliases of the server. below is the alias output.

# alias
alias l.='ls -d .* --color=auto'
alias ll='ls -l --color=auto'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias vi='vim'
alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'

Any idea how to solve this.

1. try "ls -l -h"

2. try getting rid of the existing ls aliases.

3. Otherwise, no clue

tried the ls -l -h . Its also showing the error message
# ls -l -h
ls: invalid option -- h
Try `ls --help' for more information.

Try:
/bin/ls --human-readable
/bin/ls -h
/bin/ls --version
and share the output with us.

# /bin/ls -h
/bin/ls: invalid option -- h
Try `/bin/ls --help' for more information.

# /bin/ls --human-readable
/bin/ls: unrecognized option `--human-readable'
Try `/bin/ls --help' for more information.

# /bin/ls --version
ls - GNU fileutils-3.13

Please do "bash --version"

and "echo $SHELL"

# bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.33(1)-release (i386-redhat-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

# echo $SHELL
/bin/bash

Now we are getting somewhere!! Here's mine:
Time for a system update!! (Fedora is now up to v.13, I think)

What effect would the bash version have on how the /bin/ls executable behaves? AIUI, once bash has forked itself and "exec"ed the executable it no longer has any influence on what the executable does ... ?

I have no clue how the bash version might be related to the behavior of ls-----the main point is that the OP's system is out of date. A complete system update (eg clean install of the current Fedora) will likely solve MANY issues.

Is "ls" one of the builtins? i.e. are "ls" and "/bin/ls" actually 2 different commands?

Perhaps the -h/--human-readable option was not supported in that version but that would be inconsistent with the option being described in the --help output.

Perhaps the /bin/ls binary is dependent on a shared library to implement the -h/--human-readable option and that library is AWOL. Do other commands such as df work with the -h/--human-readable option?

I can't see why /bin/ls would be making any system calls while parsing its options but running /bin/ls via strace just might give a clue and is easy to do.

Does /bin/ls --human-readable work on any other Fedora 8 systems? If so, can you copy /bin/ls from the problem system to a system where it works (under a different name!) and see if it works there? Can you compare checksums of /bin/ls on the problem system and on other Fedora 8 systems (running the same version of /bin/ls)?

Hi All,

I copied /bin/ls from another machine (Fedora 9) and overwritted the /bin/ls of fedora 8. Now the command "ls" work properly without any issues.

Not only that I faced some difficulties to overwrite /bin/ls. /bin/ls was having file attributes. Appendable (-a) and immutable (i)

# lsattr ls
s---ia-------- ls

I removed the file attributes and overwrote /bin/ls after taking a backup.

Now All are working fine for me. Thank you very much for helping me to solve this issue.

Thanks,
Nikesh