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up vote 9 down vote favorite

I am working on creating a 'cheat sheet' of shell commands. I am currently researching the ls command and its flags. For the -F flag I know what the majority of the appended indicators mean but for; = and | I can't find any information.

Could someone please tell me what these commands mean.

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1  
Possible duplicate of What does the l command do? (my answer there explains what all those symbols mean). On the other hand, that's considerably more general, so if you answer this as @Aditya suggests, it probably doesn't need to be closed as a duplicate. – Eliah Kagan Feb 3 at 12:13
Out of interest is this 'cheat sheet' going to be/is published ? – pl1nk Feb 7 at 11:52
@pl1nk no, it was for Uni. If you need help with commands view the site I have in my answer – Dan1676 Feb 11 at 17:59

2 Answers

up vote 12 down vote

I believe you're talking about indicators presented by ls -F. From the manpage of ls:

-F, --classify
   append indicator (one of */=>@|) to entries

[...]

--indicator-style=WORD
   append indicator with style WORD to entry names: none (default), slash (-p),
   file-type (--file-type), classify (-F)

To get an overview of the meaning of these indicators, we have to dive into the info page as suggested at the bottom of the manpage (info coreutils 'ls invocation'):

`-F'
`--classify'
`--indicator-style=classify'
     Append a character to each file name indicating the file type.
     Also, for regular files that are executable, append `*'.  The file
     type indicators are `/' for directories, `@' for symbolic links,
     `|' for FIFOs, `=' for sockets, `>' for doors, and nothing for
     regular files.  Do not follow symbolic links listed on the command
     line unless the `--dereference-command-line' (`-H'),
     `--dereference' (`-L'), or
     `--dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir' options are specified.

Above is an excerpt taken from the 'General output formatting' section. Go there directly using info coreutils 'General output formatting'.

TL;DR

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

I found the answer while looking at the -i flag in http://freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ls.

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I don't see how "-i For each file, print the file's file serial number (inode number)." helps you out in getting the meaning of the indicators with ls -F. – gertvdijk Feb 4 at 11:10
@gertvdijk I was actually meaning to suggest the OP give the answer.(I should've made that clearer, as I was pinging you.) But thanks for contributing an excellent answer! – Eliah Kagan Feb 4 at 11:22

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