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exa is unmaintained, use the fork eza instead.

(This repository isn’t archived because the only person with the rights to do so is unreachable).


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exa

exa is a modern replacement for ls.

README Sections: OptionsInstallationDevelopment

Unit tests

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Screenshots of exa


exa is a modern replacement for the venerable file-listing command-line program ls that ships with Unix and Linux operating systems, giving it more features and better defaults. It uses colours to distinguish file types and metadata. It knows about symlinks, extended attributes, and Git. And it’s small, fast, and just one single binary.

By deliberately making some decisions differently, exa attempts to be a more featureful, more user-friendly version of ls. For more information, see exa’s website.


<a id="options"> <h1>Command-line options</h1> </a>

exa’s options are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ls’s.

Display options

Filtering options

Pass the --all option twice to also show the . and .. directories.

Long view options

These options are available when running with --long (-l):

Some of the options accept parameters:


<a id="installation"> <h1>Installation</h1> </a>

exa is available for macOS and Linux. More information on how to install exa is available on the Installation page.

Alpine Linux

On Alpine Linux, enable community repository and install the exa package.

apk add exa

Arch Linux

On Arch, install the exa package.

pacman -S exa

Android / Termux

On Android / Termux, install the exa package.

pkg install exa

Debian

On Debian, install the exa package.

apt install exa

Fedora

On Fedora, install the exa package.

dnf install exa

Gentoo

On Gentoo, install the sys-apps/exa package.

emerge sys-apps/exa

Homebrew

If you’re using Homebrew on macOS, install the exa formula.

brew install exa

MacPorts

If you're using MacPorts on macOS, install the exa port.

port install exa

Nix

On nixOS, install the exa package.

nix-env -i exa

openSUSE

On openSUSE, install the exa package.

zypper install exa

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) and later, install the exa package.

sudo apt install exa

Void Linux

On Void Linux, install the exa package.

xbps-install -S exa

Manual installation from GitHub

Compiled binary versions of exa are uploaded to GitHub when a release is made. You can install exa manually by downloading a release, extracting it, and copying the binary to a directory in your $PATH, such as /usr/local/bin.

For more information, see the Manual Installation page.

Cargo

If you already have a Rust environment set up, you can use the cargo install command:

cargo install exa

Cargo will build the exa binary and place it in $HOME/.cargo.

To build without Git support, run cargo install --no-default-features exa is also available, if the requisite dependencies are not installed.


<a id="development"> <h1>Development <a href="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/01/10/Rust-1.66.1.html"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/rustc-1.66.1+-lightgray.svg" alt="Rust 1.66.1+" /> </a> <a href="https://github.com/ogham/exa/blob/master/LICENCE"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/licence-MIT-green" alt="MIT Licence" /> </a> </h1></a>

exa is written in Rust. You will need rustc version 1.66.1 or higher. The recommended way to install Rust for development is from the official download page, using rustup.

Once Rust is installed, you can compile exa with Cargo:

cargo build
cargo test

For more information, see the Building from Source page.

Testing with Vagrant

exa uses Vagrant to configure virtual machines for testing.

Programs such as exa that are basically interfaces to the system are notoriously difficult to test. Although the internal components have unit tests, it’s impossible to do a complete end-to-end test without mandating the current user’s name, the time zone, the locale, and directory structure to test. (And yes, these tests are worth doing. I have missed an edge case on many an occasion.)

The initial attempt to solve the problem was just to create a directory of “awkward” test cases, run exa on it, and make sure it produced the correct output. But even this output would change if, say, the user’s locale formats dates in a different way. These can be mocked inside the code, but at the cost of making that code more complicated to read and understand.

An alternative solution is to fake everything: create a virtual machine with a known state and run the tests on that. This is what Vagrant does. Although it takes a while to download and set up, it gives everyone the same development environment to test for any obvious regressions.

First, initialise the VM:

host$ vagrant up

The first command downloads the virtual machine image, and then runs our provisioning script, which installs Rust and exa’s build-time dependencies, configures the environment, and generates some awkward files and folders to use as test cases. Once this is done, you can SSH in, and build and test:

host$ vagrant ssh
vm$ cd /vagrant
vm$ cargo build
vm$ ./xtests/run
All the tests passed!

Of course, the drawback of having a standard development environment is that you stop noticing bugs that occur outside of it. For this reason, Vagrant isn’t a necessary development step — it’s there if you’d like to use it, but exa still gets used and tested on other platforms. It can still be built and compiled on any target triple that it supports, VM or no VM, with cargo build and cargo test.