This has long puzzled me and this seemed like the best venue to solicit the perspective of those with far more POSIX time-in-grade than I have. I consider the parsing of ls output in this manner to be crucial and creating aliases to modify the ls command to default to it is always one of the first customizations I make to a new terminal profile.
Is this just an nasty side-effect of too many formative years spent using the Windows Explorer? Is there a mindset for interpreting the default mixed output that I've never heard explained, and once I do will have an epiphany with instant comprehension of why only cretins want directories and files separated? I know this is trivial but ls is such a touchstone for all command line activities that I feel as though I've missed something profound.
Thank you in advance for your teleological tutelage.
This was discussed when the option was added to ls; Jim Meyering said
Just one little question about this patch: are you sure not to add a short option for
--group-directories-first?For now, yes. It would take a strong argument to go against the “no new short option names” policy for
ls, especially considering the alternative mentioned below.
--group-directories-firstis already in mylsaliases ;) but in this month I had to use other linuxes where those aliases were not defined, and I realized that typing--group-directories-firstfor such a useful feature is IMHO really annoying...Did you know that you can abbreviate that option with
--g, since there is no other long option name starting withg?
So basically, ls already has so many short options (which is itself a running joke in Unix circles) that it takes a really strong argument to add one, and --group-directories-first has a nice pseudo-short alternative.
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