The ls command lists the files in a directory. Tacking on the -l flag
will list it in long format. By default, everything is listed in
lexicographical order. This is what ls -l looks like for this repository.
-rw-r--r-- 1 jbranchaud staff 628 Feb 14 2016 CONTRIBUTING.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 jbranchaud staff 1058 Feb 19 2015 LICENSE
-rw-r--r-- 1 jbranchaud staff 40983 Aug 18 16:59 README.md
drwxr-xr-x 5 jbranchaud staff 170 Apr 1 14:45 ack
drwxr-xr-x 5 jbranchaud staff 170 Feb 24 16:31 chrome
...
Sometimes you want a sense of what has been modified and when.
Lexicographical order isn't going to help much here. By tacking on the -t
flag, the files will be listed in order of their modification dates. Here is
ls -lt for the same repository.
-rw-r--r-- 1 jbranchaud staff 40983 Aug 18 16:59 README.md
drwxr-xr-x 119 jbranchaud staff 4046 Aug 17 11:38 vim
drwxr-xr-x 5 jbranchaud staff 170 Aug 16 10:47 internet
drwxr-xr-x 23 jbranchaud staff 782 Aug 1 10:17 javascript
drwxr-xr-x 7 jbranchaud staff 238 Jul 22 14:04 webpack
...
See man ls for more details.