labria’s ruby blog

This article is published as a reply to the last few articles on the thoughtbot blog.

Some time or another during the project development you may wonder: «What files does my project include?» or «Why am I a Star Wars fan anyway?». This article will focus on the first question, leaving the second to your own reflection.

Any shell you might be using comes with a lot of useful tools. The one of interest today is ls

Here's the most simple example of its usage in a Rails project

 
sample_project $ ls
README		app		db		lib		public		test		vendor
Rakefile	config		doc		log		script		tmp
 

As a little more complex example, you might want to get the list of your model files:

 
sample_project $ ls app/models/
comment.rb	post.rb
 

Or, it even can do crazy stuff, like list all your model files AND controller files AND helper files! Now thats some useful magic, isn't it?

 
sample_project $ ls app/*
app/controllers:
application_controller.rb	comments_controller.rb		posts_controller.rb
 
app/helpers:
application_helper.rb	comments_helper.rb	posts_helper.rb
 
app/models:
comment.rb	post.rb
 
app/views:
comments	layouts		posts
 

ls can do much. much more. Go check out the manual page here, you'll be amazed.

Note to Windows users: you also have a similar command, named dir.