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Just an alternative with more advanced formating for readability purpose. It now uses colors (too much for me but it's a kind of proof-of-concept), and adjust columns.
This version now adds a header with consecutive numbering.
-n switch keeps empty columns
If your distribution does not ship with a recent column version that supports -n you can use this alternative:
perl -pe 's/(^|;);/$1 ;/g' file.csv | column -ts\; | less -S
Change the delimiter to your liking.
I like the other three versions but one uses nested loops and another prints every color on a separate line. Both versions fail to reset colors before giving the prompt back.
This version uses the column command to print a table so all the colors fit on one screen. It also resets colors back to normal before as a last step.
This shows every bit of information that stat can get for any file, dir, fifo, etc. It's great because it also shows the format and explains it for each format option.
If you just want stat help, create this handy alias 'stath' to display all format options with explanations.
alias stath="stat --h|sed '/Th/,/NO/!d;/%/!d'"
To display on 2 lines:
( F=/etc/screenrc N=c IFS=$'\n'; for L in $(sed 's/%Z./%Z\n/'<<<`stat --h|sed -n '/^ *%/s/^ *%\(.\).*$/\1:%\1/p'`); do G=$(echo "stat -$N '$L' \"$F\""); eval $G; N=fc;done; )
For a similarly powerful stat-like function optimized for pretty output (and can sort by any field), check out the "lll" function
From my .bash_profile ->
http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html
I love this function because it tells me everything I want to know about files, more than stat, more than ls. It's very useful and infinitely expandable.
find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n' | sort -rgbS 50%
00761 drwxrw---x askapache:askapache 777:666 [06/10/10 | 06/10/10 | 06/10/10] [d] /web/cg/tmp
The key is:
# -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n'
which believe it or not took me hundreds of tweaking before I was happy with the output.
You can easily use this within a function to do whatever you want.. This simple function works recursively if you call it with -r as an argument, and sorts by file permissions.
lsl(){ O="-maxdepth 1";sed -n '/-r/!Q1'<<<$@ &&O=;find $PWD $O -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n'|sort -rgbS 50%; }
Personally I'm using this function because:
lll () { local a KS="1 -r -g"; sed -n '/-sort=/!Q1' <<< $@ && KS=`sed 's/.*-sort=\(.*\)/\1/g'<<<$@`;
find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n'|sort -k$KS -bS 50%; }
# i can sort by user
lll -sort=3
# or sort by group reversed
lll -sort=4 -r
# and sort by modification time
lll -sort=6
If anyone wants to help me make this function handle multiple dirs/files like ls, go for it and I would appreciate it.. Something very minimal would be awesome.. maybe like:
for a; do lll $a; done
Note this uses the latest version of GNU find built from source, easy to build from gnu ftp tarball. Taken from my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html
Once you get into advanced/optimized scripts, functions, or cli usage, you will use the sort command alot. The options are difficult to master/memorize however, and when you use sort commands as much as I do (some examples below), it's useful to have the help available with a simple alias. I love this alias as I never seem to remember all the options for sort, and I use sort like crazy (much better than uniq for example).
# Sorts by file permissions
find . -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %p\n' | sort -k1 -r -g -bS 20%
00761 drwxrw---x ./tmp
00755 drwxr-xr-x .
00701 drwx-----x ./askapache-m
00644 -rw-r--r-- ./.htaccess
# Shows uniq history fast
history 1000 | sed 's/^[0-9 ]*//' | sort -fubdS 50%
exec bash -lxv
export TERM=putty-256color
Taken from my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html
If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command.
# creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com
ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com'
# /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10
# create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory
tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g' <<< $PWD`.tgz) .
# tar -czf /home/gpl/.backups/04-22-10-01:13-#home#gpl#.rr#src.tgz .
I personally find myself having to reference
date --help
quite a bit as a result. So this nice alias saves me a lot of time. This is one bdash mofo. Works in sh and bash (posix), but will likely need to be changed for other shells due to the parameter substitution going on.. Just extend the sed command, I prefer sed to pretty much everything anyways.. but it's always preferable to put in the extra effort to go for as much builtin use as you can. Otherwise it's not a top one-liner, it's a lazyboy recliner.
Here's the old version:
alias dateh='date --help|sed "/^ *%%/,/^ *%Z/!d;s/ \+/ /g"|while read l;do date "+ %${l/% */}_${l/% */}_${l#* }";done|column -s_ -t'
This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ]
Define a function
vert () { echo $1 | grep -o '.'; }
Use it to print some column headers
paste <(vert several) <(vert parallel) <(vert vertical) <(vert "lines of") <(vert "text can") <(vert "be used") <(vert "for labels") <(vert "for columns") <(vert "of numbers")
since fuse mounts do not appear in /etc/mtab (fuse can't write there, dunno if it would if it could) this is propably a better way.
Particularly useful if you're mounting different drives, using the following command will allow you to see all the filesystems currently mounted on your computer and their respective specs with the added benefit of nice formatting.