What's the easiest way to remove the “total <size>” line from the output of ls -l?

Question

The best I could find via Google/man ls was:

ls -l | grep -v '^total'

Is there something I'm missing in the flags to ls?

Also, why is the total size in kb, regardless of the -h flag? scratch that, seems like it does, not sure what I was seeing then.

Answer 1

Looking in the source code of coreutils, I found out that total will always be displayed when using the -l option on directories.

Using the -d option to list entries instead of directory contents hides total. But if you run that without arguments (or on a directory), it'll just show the directory and not its contents. Therefore, you need wildcards. * matches all files and .* matches hidden files as well (which corresponds with the -a option):

ls -ld * .*

As for the -h option, it works for me. 1118360 bytes show up as 1.1M. Files smaller than 1024 show up in bytes.

Answer 2

Using wildcards to avoid having ls running the directory listing is suboptimal, because it prevents you from using ls options like --almost-all.

Like Enzotib's suggestion, the simplest way to remove it is to pipe it through tail to chop off the first line. However, ls will detect that it its output is a pipe rather than interactive, and change its defaults in an unwanted way. Hence, to make it robust, you should also add some options:

• --color=always: keep showing colors
• --hide-control-chars: print ? in filenames in place of control characters that could mess up the console output

I have a script ~/bin/l (you could also use a Bash alias in ~/.bash_aliases):

#!/bin/bash
ls -l --color=always --hide-control-chars "$@" | tail --lines=+2

You can also add any other ls options you want by default, e.g. --group-directories-first --time-style='+%FT%T.%N%:::z' --indicator-style=slash.

Answer 3

ls -l *

Will give you "normally named" folder contents without the total. That might be suitable for your needs. Unfortunately, it will not give you the dot prefixed files. If you use ls -l * .* you will get a mess since linux will navigate up the tree.

Note the dot prefix could mean the folder or with a wildcard it means the above folder so it does not help you to pick regular files that are dot prefixed. This seems to have been an unfortunate design decision.

Answer 4

$ ls -l [DIRECTORY] | sed 1d
(output contains file names)

$ ls -ld [path-to-dir]/*
(output contains relative paths but will preserve colors)

$ ls -l [DIRECTORY] | tail -n +2

$ ls -l [DIRECTORY] | awk 'NR>=1'

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Note:
The following doesn't work if you have a file named "total...."

$ ls -l | grep -v '^total'