Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

#18 Displaying the Contents of Directories

While the ls command is a cornerstone of working with the Unix command line, there's one element of the command that's always seemed pointless to me: indicating the size of a directory. When a directory is listed, the program either lists the directory's contents file by file or shows the number of 1,024-byte blocks required for the directory data. A typical entry in an ls -l output might be

drwxrwxr-x    2 taylor   taylor       4096 Oct 28 19:07 bin

But that's really not very useful, because what I want to know is how many files are in the specified directory. That's what this script accomplishes, generating a nice multicolumn listing of files and directories that shows file size with file entries and ...