> ls -a | grep ".c$" This is silly, of course, but if you want to be rigorous about it you probably should do 'ls -a | grep "\\.c$"' because grep (unlike the shell) uses proper regex syntax -- in which '.' is a special character (match any char). Thus 'ls -a | grep ".c$" would list files such as 'fooc', so escaping the . is necessary. Two backslashes are required to get through the shell escaping. Apropos, I have a question: frequently I am in a directory (such as /dev, for example) which has more stuff in it than I can see in one screenful. Normally I pipe it through less, but am bothered by the 'one file per line'-isms that ls spits out in this case. I understand the necessity of this behaviour, but I was wondering, is there some option which forces columnated output regardless of the presence of a filter? -C is documented as column-formatting, but it is ignored in a pipe. In a related question, can one force sort by rows instead of by columns, ie, "a b c\nd e f" instead of "a c e\nb d f"? I say related because when viewing copious output through a pager, it would be useful to have sort by rows instead of by columns, which is the default behaviour. -- Alexander Poquet | We leave the obvious generalizations to the atpoquet@ucdavis.edu | reader. -- Israel Herstein Use of PGP preferable in reply | Use Linux!
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