There’s more than one way to do it!  I think that should be one of the mottos of Linux®.  There’s always more than one way to do it.  That’s what we’re going to talk about in this post, some of the more than one way to do the commands we’ve already learned.

We learned about ls and how it has flags.  One of the most useful flags is -l which lets us see all the group ownerships and users and everything we could need.

For example:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ ls -l
total 164
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 69632 Aug  9 13:15 bin
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Jan  5  2016 games
drwxr-xr-x  82 root root 20480 Jul 17 16:18 include
drwxr-xr-x 111 root root 24576 Jul 17 16:18 lib
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 12288 Aug  3 06:43 libexec
drwxr-xr-x  19 root root  4096 Dec 27  2016 local
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root 12288 Jul 28 18:58 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 199 root root  4096 Jul 28 18:58 share
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Apr 19  2012 src
drwxr-x---   3 root root  4096 Jan  5  2016 var

I listed all the files and directories in /usr using ls -l.  I can do the same thing with the command vdir.

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ vdir /usr
total 164
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 69632 Aug  9 13:15 bin
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Jan  5  2016 games
drwxr-xr-x  82 root root 20480 Jul 17 16:18 include
drwxr-xr-x 111 root root 24576 Jul 17 16:18 lib
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 12288 Aug  3 06:43 libexec
drwxr-xr-x  19 root root  4096 Dec 27  2016 local
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root 12288 Jul 28 18:58 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 199 root root  4096 Jul 28 18:58 share
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Apr 19  2012 src
drwxr-x---   3 root root  4096 Jan  5  2016 var

There’s more than one way to list the files.  I can even do it with find though it’s much more work than just doing vdir or ls.

If I leave off the -l flag, I get:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ ls /usr
bin  games  include  lib  libexec  local  sbin	share  src  var

I get the same output if I do the following two commands, just with fewer spaces:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ cd /usr
Alpha:~ computerlamp$ echo *

In other words, there’s more than one way to do it.  I can ls -l or vdir, or I can ls or use the echo * trick.

This is certainly not the only case of more than one command to do the same thing.  It keeps things interesting when you’re learning Linux®.