The ls command in 180 seconds

Key Takeaways

It's important that you learn a Linux in 2026. And to help you do that, I'm going to cover some commands. Do you know this Linux command? Alice allows us to list files and directories in the current directory. I can also, as an example, have a look at another directory such as my downloads directory. I can see that these files are available in the downloads directory. You can see my downloads are in blue. The files are in white here. So clearing my screen, I can use lice to see files and directories in my current directory. Print working directory shows me my current directory. I'm in home David. But again, Alice shows me those files. But to see that in more detail, I can use the -L option or hyphen L. And you can see the long form version of the output. We can see permissions on files and directories. You can also see that downloads is a directory because of the D shown here. We don't see that for these two files because they are files rather than directories. I'll cover permissions in more detail later, but permissions are shown as well as other information about the files and directories. If I use a I can see hidden files. So all files. So previously as an example, we didn't see this directory or this file. Notice the dot or period if you prefer. This is a hidden directory and hidden file. But using A shows me that output. L once again allows me to see more details. If I just did - A, I would see the output as follows. If I wanted to see the information in reverse order, I could use -ash R. So notice rather than seeing it that way, I am seeing it in reverse order. Up key allows me to see a previous command. I could also use Ctrl P as an example to display the previous command. But notice ls-l shows me the output of this directory. LS is a really important command. In the output here, once again, we can see a whole bunch of options which I'll cover in separate videos. Now, as always in Linux, use the option-help to see help about a command. So, scrolling up here, you can see there are a lot of options available with lice or list. We can see lowerase A, uppercase A, and a whole bunch of other options. And once again, don't forget that in Linux, commands are case-sensitive. So that is a different command to this and so is that. So everything is case sensitive in Linux. Okay. So did you learn anything? Did you know this command already? Are there any other options that you would suggest? Please put in the comments if you've got other options that you find useful with this command. It's important that you learn Linux in 2026.