Pattern: Use of ls instead of find
Issue: -
ls is only intended for human consumption: it has a loose, non-standard format and may "clean up" filenames to make output easier to read.
Here's an example:
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r----- 1 me me 0 Feb 5 20:11 foo?bar
-rw-r----- 1 me me 0 Feb 5 2011 foo?bar
-rw-r----- 1 me me 0 Feb 5 20:11 foo?barIt shows three seemingly identical filenames, and did you spot the time format change? How it formats and what it redacts can differ between locale settings, ls version, and whether output is a tty.
ls can usually be substituted for find if it's the filenames you're after.
If trying to parse out any other fields, first see whether stat (GNU, OS X, FreeBSD) or find -printf (GNU) can give you the data you want directly.
Example of incorrect code:
ls -l | grep " $USER " | grep '\.txt$'Example of correct code:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' -user "$USER"If the information is intended for the user and not for processing (ls -l ~/dir | nl; echo "Ok to delete these files?") you can ignore this error with a directive.