How to `ls` only one level deep?

bash ls
Nick Vence picture Nick Vence · Feb 7, 2011 · Viewed 28.4k times · Source

I have lots subdirectories containing data, and I want a short list of which jobs (subdirectories) I have. I'm not happy with the following command.

$ ls H2*
H2a:
energy.dat overlap.dat 
norm.dat zdip.dat ...
(much more)
H2b:
energy.dat overlap.dat
norm.dat zdip.dat ... 
(much more)

This needless clutter defeats the purpose of the wildcard (limiting the output). How can I limit the output to one level deep? I'd like to see the following output 

H2a/ H2b/ H2z/

Thanks for your help, Nick

Answer

harpo picture harpo · Feb 7, 2011

Try this

ls -d H2*/

The -d option is supposed to list "directories only", but by itself just lists

.

which I personally find kind of strange. The wildcard is needed to get an actual list of directories.

UPDATE: As @Philipp points out, you can do this even more concisely and without leaving bash by saying

echo H2*/

The difference is that ls will print the items on separate lines, which is often useful for piping to other functions.

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