Score:2

Ubuntu

display the filenames with 4 or more characters using ls

ben sunny

3/5/23, 10:56 PM

How to display the filenames with 4 or more characters using the ls command

426

0 + 0

command-line

files

text-processing

Score:9

Ubuntu

waltinator

3/5/23, 11:07 PM

Use wildcards (they're not regexps):

ls -A -d ????*

That's 4 "any characters" followed by "any number of any characters". man ls.

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marcelm

3/6/23, 10:35 AM

You say `man ls`, but what good will that do anyone? Globbing is performed by the shell; `ls` doesn't know about it and there's nothing about it in its manual.

Quasímodo

3/6/23, 1:16 PM

Although I see the asker artificially required Ls, invoking Ls here is just useless and requires using `-d` flag to make Ls work more or less like a plain Printf at the end of the day. In other words, spawning no new external process, one may simply write `printf '%s\n' ????*` or `echo ????*`.

Zanna

3/6/23, 2:21 PM

@Quasímodo `printf` works (though filenames having newlines might cause confusion), but with `echo` I get no newlines making it impossible to read the filenames. The advantage of `ls` is that it's designed to *display to the user* files in a directory in the most readable and unambiguous way. Personally, I don't think all of its design elements contribute to that end, but that is the intent. The commands you mention have different purposes and are less suited to this task.

Zanna

3/6/23, 2:22 PM

I agree with marcelm. We should rather read `man bash` or indeed https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Filename-Expansion - `man ls` will be of little help.

Will

3/6/23, 4:05 PM

@waltinator - should it be ls -A -d ???* if he wants 4 or more characters? I’m not sure if the * mandates at least 1 character after the 4 wildcards in your answer? Or can the * be any number of characters *including zero* in which case your answer is perfect?

mckenzm

3/6/23, 9:23 PM

@will - that's a good question , it doesn't - * also matches ''. So ???* matches foo - This is easily tested. Personally I would be piping ls -la through grep, and what about links and folders?

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: display the filenames with 4 or more characters using ls

TH: แสดงชื่อไฟล์ที่มีอักขระตั้งแต่ 4 ตัวขึ้นไปโดยใช้ ls

RO: afișați numele fișierelor cu 4 sau mai multe caractere folosind ls

RU: отображать имена файлов с 4 или более символами, используя ls

VI: hiển thị tên tệp có 4 ký tự trở lên bằng cách sử dụng ls

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