'ls' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file

I'm fairly certain that the ls command is for Linux, not Windows (I'm assuming you're using Windows as you referred to cmd, which is the command line for the Windows OS).

You should use dir instead, which is the Windows equivalent of ls.

Edit (since this post seems to be getting so many views :) ):

You can't use ls on cmd as it's not shipped with Windows, but you can use it on other terminal programs (such as GitBash). Note, ls might work on some FTP servers if the servers are linux based and the FTP is being used from cmd.

dir on Windows is similar to ls. To find out the various options available, just do dir/?.

If you really want to use ls, you could install 3rd party tools to allow you to run unix commands on Windows. Such a program is Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux (link to docs).

We can use ls and many other Linux commands in Windows cmd. Just follow these steps.

Steps:

1) Install Git in your computer - https://git-scm.com/downloads.

2) After installing Git, go to the folder in which Git is installed. Mostly it will be in C drive and then Program Files Folder.

3) In Program Files folder, you will find the folder named Git, find the bin folder which is inside usr folder in the Git folder.

In my case, the location for bin folder was - C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin

4) Add this location (C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin) in path variable, in system environment variables.

5) You are done. Restart cmd and try to run ls and other Linux commands.