When we list files in unix using ls -l command the output is a table with space as a separator, for example the following
(jupyter-lab) ➜ mylab ls -l
total 2
drwxr-sr-x. 2 hs0424 ragr 0 Feb 1 12:17 A bad directory
drwxr-sr-x. 2 hs0424 ragr 0 Feb 1 12:18 A very bad directory
I want to convert to a tab separated file (.tsv), just changing spaces to \t, such as ls -l | sed -E 's/ +/\t/g' would not work since filenames contain spaces. Do we have better solution ?
Hard to show expected output with tabs but if we use \t as a replacement of tab, I want something as follows,
(jupyter-lab) ➜ mylab ls -l
total 2
drwxr-sr-x.\t2\ths0424\tragr\t0\tFeb 1\t12:17\tA bad directory
drwxr-sr-x.\t2\ths0424\tragr\t0\tFeb 1\t12:18\tA very bad directory
(Edit 1)
We can assume access to GNU tools
>Solution :
Use GNU find -printf or stat, either of which let you provide an arbitrary format string, instead of ls.
find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -printf '%M\t%y\t%g\t%G\t%u\t%U\t%f\t%l\n'
or
stat --printf='%A\t%G\t%g\t%U\t%u\t%n\n' *