sls (combination of ssh and ls)

Here's a little bash script I just wrote and thought somebody might find useful. I'm always moving files around using scp and also needing to ssh around to ls them. So why not combine the ssh and the ls into sls -- just like scp, right?

Here are the usage and help text...

usage: sls [ls-option]... user@host[:file]...

sls is a magical combination of ssh and ls. Simply give the sls command some (or no) ls options and one or more remote locations and you'll get a listing for each. The remote spec is the same user@host:file specification you would use with the scp command, and the file part is optional.

And here is the script itself. If you have any fixes or improvements, please let me know.

#!/bin/bash # Copyright (c) 2011 Dave Diamond (at dldnh.com) # This script is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. usage() { echo "usage: sls [ls-option]... user@host[:file]..." if [[ $# -gt 0 && "${1:0:1}" != "-" ]] ; then echo $* ; fi if [ "${1}" != "-nodie" ] ; then exit ; fi } help() { usage -nodie cat <<EOF sls is a magical combination of ssh and ls. Simply give the sls command some (or no) ls options and one or more remote locations and you'll get a listing for each. The remote spec is the same user@host:file specification you would use with the scp command, and the file part is optional. EOF exit } if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then usage "no files specified" fi if [[ "${1}" == "-help" || "${1}" == "--help" || "${1}" == "-?" ]] ; then help fi opts= n=0 while [ $# -gt 0 ] ; do if [ "${1:0:1}" == "-" ] ; then if [ ${n} -gt 0 ] ; then usage "options before files" fi opts="${opts} ${1}" shift else file[${n}]="${1}" n=$((n+1)) shift fi done if [ $n -eq 0 ] ; then usage "no files specified" fi for ((i=0; i<n; i++)) ; do cmd[$i]=`echo ${file[$i]} | sed -e '/^[^@:]*$/ d; /^[^:@]*@[^:]*$/ s/\(.*\)/ssh \1 '"'ls ${opts}'"'/; /^.*:.*$/ s/\(.*\):\(.*\)/ssh \1 '"'ls ${opts} \2'"'/'` if [ "${cmd[$i]}" == "" ] ; then usage "unrecognized user@host[:file] format" fi done for ((i=0; i<n; i++)) ; do echo "${cmd[$i]}" bash -c "${cmd[$i]}" done

p.s. Blogger, when I write a post in HTML, please let me edit it the same way... thank you. And to visitors from the future, if you find yourself needing to edit your HTML-written post, it's actually easy now that I think about it. Just ask your browser to show you the source, grab what you need, and paste that back into the post editor.