Sorting

pls offers the ability to sort the output in your preferred order by choosing as many as you prefer from 18 bases × 2 directions per base.

Arguments

--sort/-s can be used to select the sort bases. The flag can be specified multiple times to sort by multiple bases. Each time it can take one of these values. All values except none can optionally be suffixed with an underscore _ to reverse their direction.

Name	Description
dev	device ID
ino	inode number
nlink	number of hard links
typ	node type
cat	node category (directory or file)
user	user name
uid	user ID
group	group name
gid	group ID
size	storage space
blocks	number of blocks
btime	created at; "b" for birth
ctime	changed at; originally meant "created at"
mtime	modified at
atime	accessed at
name	node name
cname	canonical name (name in lower case with leading symbols stripped)
ext	file extension
none	shorthand: no sorting

By default, pls sorts file by cat and cname, which means

• directories are listed before files (cat)
• nodes are sorted by their canonical names (cname)

When sorting by multiple sort bases, the first listed basis is the primary sort basis, the second is the tie-breaker for the first, the third is the tie-breaker for the second and so on.

Note

The canonical name of a file is obtained by stripping leading symbols from the name and then converting it to lowercase.

So the canonical name of the .DS_Store file would be 'ds_store'. This name is helpful when sorting because it allows for dotfiles and case-mixed files to be sorted along with the other files, instead of being separated out.

Mechanism

When parsing the --sort/-s flag, values are read from the CLI, in order, and added to a vector of sort bases till we encounter the shorthand value none, which clears the vector.

For example, consider the pls invocation below.

pls --sort=cat --sort=cname --sort=none --sort=mtime_

• cat is added to the list.
• cname is added to the list.
• All entries so far are dropped when none is encountered.
• mtime_ is added to the list.

Examples

pls # or --sort=cat --sort=cname or -s=cat -s=cname

  dir_a/
  dir_c/
  dir_e/
  file_b.txt
  file_d.txt
  file_f.txt

pls --det=ino --det=typ --det=size --sort=cat_ --sort=size_ --sort=ino

  inode T     Size Name
8429588 f  1.0 MiB   file_d.txt
8427180 f  1.0 KiB   file_b.txt
8430237 f 14.0   B   file_f.txt
8427179 d            dir_a/
8429584 d            dir_c/
8429597 d            dir_e/

Here the --sort/-s arguments have this effect:

• cat_ sorts directories before files.
• size_ sorts nodes by size in descending order.
• ino sorts nodes by inode number in ascending order.