How to paginate in the 'LS' command?

jhecht · 07-05-2004, 05:42 PM

Ok - newbie here... But I can't seem to find any way to make the 'ls' command do a 'paginate' function. Like doing 'dir /p' in DOS. It's a way of viewing a large bunch of files a page (screen) at a time.

I know there's GOTTA be a way to do this - but I can't find it! I'm working from the Linux commandline to copy some files to floppy from the /etc folder. There are LOTS of files in /etc...

Why am I doing this? Because there's a problem with copying files to floppy from inside any GUI on my Linux box. I can only copy to floppy at the CLI right now. See my other posts for the details.

Thanks!

acid_kewpie · 07-05-2004, 05:45 PM

ls | less

jhecht · 07-05-2004, 07:25 PM

Uh, close. 'ls | less' gives a 1 line at a time display in a single column. Better than nothing.

But what I want is a multiple column display, that scrolls one screen at a time. Is that possible?

xamdbz01 · 07-05-2004, 07:38 PM

try `ls -C | more`

jhecht · 07-06-2004, 08:23 AM

Tried that too. Gave me a single column of files that I could scroll down, same as the first command did.

XavierP · 07-06-2004, 08:26 AM

Try man ls - that will give you the options/switches to use with 'ls'.

camelrider · 07-06-2004, 03:13 PM

You could try ls -m | less

comp12345 · 07-06-2004, 03:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by jhecht
Uh, close. 'ls | less' gives a 1 line at a time display in a single column. Better than nothing.

But what I want is a multiple column display, that scrolls one screen at a time. Is that possible?

I don't understand what's wrong with the choices being given to you. 'ls | less' works just like 'dir /p'. For multiple columns, use

Code:

ls -C | less

Use:

spacebar or pagedown - to scroll down one screen
pageup - to scroll up one screen
arrow keys - to move up and down the screen

'man less' for others.

xamdbz01 · 07-06-2004, 04:26 PM

or you can try

Code:

ls -x | less

MaXM00D · 04-13-2010, 06:16 AM

And none of your advices doesn't work...

UPD: IT WAS ONLY LONG FILE NAMES!!!!!!!!! me lol

devnull10 · 04-13-2010, 07:15 AM

The output from ls is slightly odd and it seems to depend on the number of files as to how it's treated. If you do ls -C in a large directory you may see multi-column output then you do ls -C > out.txt and it will be line by line. This is on AIX 5.1.