Lets say I had a folder called ~. Now in ~ is two folders called foo and bar. foo for some reason has 8 billion files in it! Unfortunately, I can't remember if foo is spelt 'foo' or 'fuu' so I type in 'ls f*'. Unfortunately, instead of just getting all of the files in ~ that start with an f, I get all the files in foo as well. Thus I have to scroll up to find the info I was looking for.

How do I tell ls to only display the names of the files in a folder and not to display the name of files in folders that happen to start with the same char?

Try:

ls -d f*

Lyle

im not exactly sure what u mean , but in the bash profile what alias u got for the comand ls (if theres one that tells ls to be recurive then take out whatever makes it recursive i think its -R ? ls --help for more info