i'm trying to use "ls -w" so that more of the width of my screen gets used and i don't have to scroll up so much. my problem is that i can't seem to understand what the columns are. is each column a character width, pixel width, or something else? i've tried looking around with google and even experimenting on my own with different widths, but it's just not clear to me.

also, what does the -T option do? i thought it would increase the spaces between filenames by one column(whatever a column is), but it doesn't seem to behave that way.

ls -w XX sets the screen size to be assumed. It appears to keep the column spacing the same

The -T option is totally confusing......I could not figure it out in the time I was willing to devote.

As I understand the T option, all it's doing is specifying the spacing of the tab stops in the terminal output. For us old folks, this is perfectly reasonable, since a typewriter platen moved to the next tab stop every time the tab key was pressed. The "stops" were pieces of metal (little tabs) that you could slide onto a bar behind the platen that "stopped" the motion when the single-space gear was released.

Since the "terminal" window is emulating a typewriter, you should be able to specify the position of the "tab" stops, although most settings assume that the "stops" are equally spaced, so, for example, -T8 places the "stop" after every eighth character.

The -w option can be like these examples :

'ls -w120' or 'ls -w150'

( May print almost like ls -T8 )
....

I think that's the correct explanation.

What is not immediately obvious is why the default (8) gives neat columns, and other settings do not. I suspect it has to do with the actual "tab" characters that are inserted in the text stream.

so, a screensize in pixels? should i give it like "ls -w 640" if i'm in 640x480 resolution?

it's confusing because the man page calls the argument COLS(width=COLS), which i guess means columns of pixels now.

Do some experiments...

I just opened a terminal and it defaulted to 80 characters wide (not pixels).

If I do "ls -w 100", the output runs off the side of the window. Thus, I assume that---with the flag---ls thinks I have a terminal that is 100 characters wide.