Why is there an extra space when I type "ls" in the Desktop directory?
The extra space appears when you have file names in your directory needing '
around them (e.g. file names with spaces or other special characters).
~/mytmp$ ls
a 'file(abc)' proyecto3.csv test Test.sh
b 'file(ab,c?).mp4' rootfile Test1.txt Test.zip
F26 'file(abc?).mp4' scr Test2.test vowels
Feb guess script Test2.txt
'Feb 26 xx' hw something test.rar
After removing the 'strange' files I get:
~/mytmp$ ls
a guess proyecto3.csv script test Test2.txt Test.sh
b hw rootfile something Test1.txt test.rar Test.zip
F26 loop scr speak Test2.test testscript vowels
I'm pretty sure file1 file2 file3
is not what's exactly shown on your screen. You omitted precious information (the actual filenames) that might easily be relevant.
My assumption is that you have a filename that contains a space or other special character.
Newer version of coreutils's ls
quote such filenames, typically in single quotes. Plus, if there's at least one file requiring such quoting, it adds a space in front of all other filenames so that they align up "nicely" if they happen to be underneath each other, that is, the single quote mark (apostrophe) is ignored for alignment.
See --quoting-style
and -N
in the manual page of ls
for some more details, and the section "Formatting the file names" in its info page for even more details. You might e.g. consider aliasing ls
to ls -N
.