The command 'ls -d' is not displaying directories. Is there a way to...

salon_sue

Is there a way to get ls to only display directories instead of files and directories? From the man page: -d, --directory list directory entries instead of contents, and do not derefer‐ ence symbolic links So if I type it at the / directory I expect to see only directories. Instead it shows "." $ cd / $ ls -d . I was expecting ls -d to show me this: $ ls -d bin data home opt sbin sys var boot dev lib media proc selinux tmp cdrom etc lost+found...

Originally asked by nelaaro on Stack Exchange (superuser) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Your expectations are based upon DOS Think/Windows Think and are wrong. On MS-DOS, Windows, and indeed a few other IBM/Microsoft operating systems, wildcard expansion is done by the command itself, and things like the /a option to the dir command act as attribute filters during wildcard expansion. dir expands wildcards like * , which the command interpreter passes to it as-is, and if /a is specified it applies the appropriate filters to what is returned. (On some operating systems, the attribute filters can be given to the system call for enumerating a directory and the operating system kernel, or its filesystem drivers, applies them itself.) On Unices and on Linux, wildcard expansion is...

Full answer by JdeBP: https://superuser.stackexchange.com/a/344896 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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