ELS

Section: User Contributed Perl Documentation (1)
Updated: 2015-12-17
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NAME

els - List ECFS files

SYNOPSIS

els [-l][-1][-a][-d][-R] [domain1:][file1] [...]

DESCRIPTION

List ECFS files or directories. As with Unix, if the target name begins with the ``/'' character it is interpreted as an absolute path, otherwise it is relative to the current directory of the given domain1. If no domain1 is specified the default ECFS domain is assumed.

OPTIONS

Unlike UNIX, very few option flags are implemented often because the underlying transport mechanisms do not offer such fine-grained access.

-l: Produce listing in long-form. See the 'compatibility improvements' subsection.
-1: Produce short-form listing, in a single column. See the 'compatibility improvements' subsection.
-a: Like the corresponding UNIX flag, lists all files, including dot files which would normally have been suppressed in the listing.
-d: Like the corresponding UNIX flag, lists each directory argument as the directory itself, rather than its contents.
-R: Recursive listing of subdirectories. If possible it should be avoided on very large ECFS directory trees because of timeout issues. Note that at ECMWF it is often unnecessary because audit files containing a listing of domain ec: are regularly created for each user.

Compatibility improvements

By historical accident the default output of previous versions of els with no flags was equivalent to the long-form listing output of UNIX ls with -l. Additionally it was impossible to obtain a short-form listing (the default UNIX ls behaviour).

Note: This new release changes the default, no-flags, behaviour from earlier versions; it now generates the listing in short-form.

To improve compatibility this release introduces two new flags both with equivalence in UNIX: '-l' flag to do long-form listing and '-1' (digit one) to produce short-form output (hitherto impossible). In UNIX, no flags and '-1' are almost, but not quite, equivalent (the differences are comparatively minor); in this release of ECFS they are identical.

EXAMPLES

els -l 'ec:apps/*.c': Produce a long-form listing of all files and directories in the 'ec' domain which match the given wildcard specification.
Note the quoting of the remote wildcard specification: see ecfs(1).
els ec:~username: Lists all files in the ECFS home directory of user 'username'.

NOTES

No attempt is made to emulate the full range of options in various UNIX-based ls commands.

In several respects the output can differ from that of ls as it is entirely dependent on the remote service and could well vary across services and domains and, indeed, across time. In essence, the output design of ls, and thus of els, is human-oriented, not script-oriented, so care should be exercised if using the formatting of output for any significant automated purpose such as scripting.

*: The line contents in a -l listing are those supplied by the remote service.
*: In UNIX ls, if a requested filename/directory argument is given as an absolute path, then the resulting filename/directory is similarly displayed as an absolute path. This is not yet the case with els.
*: In FTP-based domains, the -d flag in the home directory may be unable to gather its information. However the -a flag includes information about '.', which is the same thing.
*: When -R is specified, the other flags tend to be ignored.