How do I select a field/column from the output of `ls -l`?
- by soandos
My goal is deceptively simple (at least to me). I wish to take the output of ls -l or ls -lh and select just one field.
I am looking for this to be as bulletproof as possible, by which I mean, assume that filenames can have a variable number of spaces, not everything in the field has the same length, etc.
Bonus points for having a script that will take the name of the the field (or even just a field number), and then return the contents of the field.
I want to turn
into: