How can I make "ls" show dotfiles first?

Question

Somewhere along the way I screwed up my ls command and now I get this ordering when running

$ ls -AhHl --color=auto
-rwxr-xr-x 1 clang clang  640 Mar  1 02:46 apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png
-rwxr-xr-x 1 clang clang  784 Jul 12 02:54 crossdomain.xml
-rwxr-xr-x 1 clang clang 1.2K Mar  1 02:46 favicon.ico
drwxr-xr-x 8 clang clang 4.0K Jul 12 23:50 .git
-rw-r--r-- 1 clang clang   17 Feb 29 19:48 .gitignore
-rwxr-xr-x 1 clang clang 1.4K Jul 12 02:54 humans.txt

What did I do that made ls ignore the dotfiles and instead order by first letter?

Output of locale:

$ locale
LANG=
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

score 56 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 12 '20 at 13:48

⚠️ This answer is a little dated. Please check out the other answers, particularly those using aliases or ls -v.

Try adding

export LC_COLLATE="C"

in your dotfiles, or changing the LC_ALL assignment to:

export LC_ALL="C"

This controls the way sorting on character level works — while the default would be to sort dotfiles inline, this will make sort list dotfiles first.

However, note that this will basically stop support for your actual locale across all locale-aware utilities.

To go further, quoting the GNU Coreutils manual (emphasis mine):

If you use a non-POSIX locale (e.g., by setting LC_ALL to en_US), then sort may produce output that is sorted differently than you're accustomed to.

In that case, set the LC_ALL environment variable to C. Note that setting only LC_COLLATE has two problems. First, it is ineffective if LC_ALL is also set. Second, it has undefined behavior if LC_CTYPE (or LANG, if LC_CTYPE is unset) is set to an incompatible value. For example, you get undefined behavior if LC_CTYPE is ja_JP.PCK but LC_COLLATE is en_US.UTF-8.

score 44 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 18 '15 at 11:07

To avoid any system wide changes without real need, one can change only the way how ls works for the current user by adding the alias to the .bashrc:

alias ll='LC_COLLATE=C ls -alF'

This sorts dot files first, allows to properly handle (show and sort) "uncommon" character sets like cyrillic. The only culprit that the sorting will be case-sensitive.

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=816753

score 34 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 07 '18 at 07:51

34

The ls(1) manpage lists:

-v natural sort of (version) numbers within text

This seems change how periods are sorted and does group dotfiles first. I have:

alias ls='ls -vAF'
alias ll='ls -l'

in my ~/.bashrc.

answered Oct 07 '18 at 07:51

Vince Valenti

341

score 11 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 09 '13 at 21:08

11

Setting

LC_ALL="C.UTF-8"

works fine for me - umlauts and "ls -la" lists dot-files first.

answered Oct 09 '13 at 21:08

Faroul

119

Bruno Bronosky · Answer 5 · 2018-07-09T19:56:04.380

An off the wall idea

Disclaimer: This is going to be overkill for most of you. But I've been doing this since 1995 and I have the skills to make my world exactly how I want it. So, I why not?

I really like using different sorting methods with ls, especially -rt (which is sort by reverse modified time). So, I decided to try something crazy and use awk to do my sorting.

# save as ~/.ls.awk
# inpsired by http://superuser.com/questions/448291/how-can-i-make-ls-show-dotfiles-first

{
    if($1 == "total"){
        print $0
        next
    }
    # may need to adjust $9 to match your name column
    if(match($9, /^(\033\[[0-9]*m)*\./)) # optionally look past xterm highlighting like: ^[[34m
        df[++dd] = $0
    else
        nf[++nn] = $0
}
END{
    while (++d in df)
        print df[d]
    while (++n in nf)
        print nf[n]
}

Now instead of defining a bash alias, I define a bash function (because aliases can only append arguments at the end, but functions can use them anywhere)

ll(){ CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 ls -lhA $* | awk -f ~/.ls.awk; }

To see the results

Let's create some sample files:

for n in 4 .4 3 .3 2 .2 1 .1; do touch $n; sleep 1; done

Using plain ls

$ ls -lA
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 .1
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 .2
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 .3
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 .4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff  285 Nov 29 13:14 .ls.awk
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 1
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 2
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 3
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 4
$ ls -lArt

total 8
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff  285 Nov 29 13:14 .ls.awk
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 4
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 .4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 3
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 .3
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 2
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 .2
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 1
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff    0 Dec  1 00:25 .1

Using my function that filters with awk

$ ll
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 .1
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 .2
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 .3
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 .4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff   285B Nov 29 13:14 .ls.awk
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 1
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 2
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 3
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 4

$ ll -rt
total 8
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff   285B Nov 29 13:14 .ls.awk
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 .4
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 .3
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 .2
-rw-r--r--  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 .1
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 4
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 3
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 2
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bbronosky  staff     0B Dec  1 00:25 1

You can see my implementation of this here https://github.com/RichardBronosky/dotfiles/commit/6170c0a9

What's most important about this is that it is a framework for tweaking your ls output. You can do anything you want with that awk filter. You might want it to be directories, then dotfiles, then everything else. Once you know how to handle your xterm colors, it's not too difficult. It's totally up to you.

Jesko · Answer 6 · 2022-10-02T23:51:34.057

1

The following line shows (dot-)directories first and the (dot-)files. I had trouble to find out the right solution within the other answers so I wanted to clarify it:

ls -vAFl --group-directories-first

This shows

dot-dirs first
then other dirs (but case sensitive: first upper- then lower-case)
dot-files
non-dot files

edited Oct 02 '22 at 23:51

answered Sep 29 '22 at 17:18

Jesko

11

Sanders Gutiérrez · Answer 7 · 2022-10-02T07:59:25.127

0

ls -lvAX

-l : use a long listing format

-v : natural sort of (version) numbers within text

-A : do not list implied . and ..

-X : sort alphabetically by entry extension

edited Oct 02 '22 at 07:59

answered Oct 02 '22 at 07:56

Sanders Gutiérrez

1

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Jun 05 '25 at 13:23

0

I know I'm late to the party, but I think what you want to do is

export LC_COLLATE=C
unset LC_ALL

The value of LC_ALL overrides the individual LC_ variables.

answered Jun 05 '25 at 13:23

hymie

1,276

score -1 · Answer 9 · answered Dec 20 '17 at 05:27

Might try this in your .bashrc or /etc/bashrc file:

LS_OPTIONS='--color=tty -A -F -X -B -h -v -b -T 0 --group-directories-first';
export LS_OPTIONS;
alias ls='/bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS';

This assumes you're running a somewhat newer version of ls that takes "--group-directories-first" as an option. You can obviously tweak the LS options to your liking.

How can I make "ls" show dotfiles first?

9 Answers9

An off the wall idea

To see the results

Using plain ls

Using my function that filters with awk

Linked