Question

3

Can ls -l be made to separate fields with tabs rather than spaces to make the output useful in a spreadsheet?

rated 0 times [ 3] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 14043 / 2 Years ago, tue, june 28, 2022, 1:24:36

How can the output of ls -l be modified to separate fields using tabs instead of spaces? I want to paste the output into a spreadsheet; the padding with a variable number of spaces makes it difficult to do so. To illustrate:



drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     4096 Sep 26 11:43 wpa_supplicant

-rw-r-----  1 root dialout    66 Sep 26 11:43 wvdial.conf

drwxr-xr-x  9 root root     4096 Oct  8 08:21 X11

drwxr-xr-x 12 root root     4096 Feb 18 23:31 xdg

drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     4096 Jan 31 06:11 xml

drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     4096 Nov 22 07:26 xul-ext

-rw-r--r--  1 root root      349 Jan 13  2012 zsh_command_not_found

In the excerpt from ls -l /etc shown above, rows 1, 2 and 3 have a single digit in column 2 whereas row 4 has two. That means the alignment is achieved by using two spaces for separating columns 1 and 2 in rows 1-3, but just one space in row 4.

Answers

Only authorized users can answer the question. Please sign in first, or register a free account.

anxietunnel

Add To Favorites

Follow

Total Points: 66

Total Questions: 120

Total Answers: 115

Location: Norway

Member since Sat, Mar 4, 2023

1 Year ago

answered 2 Years ago trousransla · Accepted Answer

I've made a shell script for the same. It takes care of the cases when the filenames have spaces or any other special characters.



#! /bin/bash



SAVEIFS=$IFS

IFS=$(echo -en "

")

for file in $(ls)

do

    stat --printf="%A	%h	%U	%G	%s	" $file

    mod_epoch=$(stat --format="%Y" $file)

    mod_month=$(date -d @$mod_epoch +"%b")

    mod_day=$(date -d @$mod_epoch +"%d")

    mod_time=$(date -d @$mod_epoch +"%H:%M")

    printf "%s	%s	%s	%s

" $mod_month $mod_day $mod_time $file

done

IFS=$SAVEIFS

Save it to a file, say ls_tab.sh

Make it executable:



chmod +x ls_tab.sh

Run it:



./ls_tab.sh

Note: This can be done by parsing the output of ls, however the reason why it should not be done is given here.