What's the difference between ls and la? Why do they give the same output?

Question

I entered la accidentally instead of ls to view the contents of a directory and it produces exactly the same output as ls...

Why is this? Surely it doesn't make sense to have two commands that do the exact same thing.

Answer 1

la is an alias to ls -A defined in ~/.bashrc file in Ubuntu.

It only shows the same output if you have no hidden files or directories.

ls -A shows hidden files and directories.

Answer 2

la is defined as an alias in Ubuntus ~/.bashrc file together with a few others. la is simply an ls -A as you can see in the following snippet from the ~/.bashrc

# this alias is defined earlier to grant colored output
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

# some more ls aliases
alias ll='ls -alF'
alias la='ls -A'
alias l='ls -CF'
alias li='ls -lF'

Answer 3

When in doubt, type la.

---

Bash output:

la is aliased to `ls -la'

Fish output:

la is a function with definition
function la --description 'List contents of directory, including hidden files in directory using long format'
    ls -lah $argv
end

Answer 4

ls is a command, l and la are most likely aliases which make use of the command ls. If you run the command alias you can find all the aliases on your system.

$ alias | grep -E ' l=| la='

This will return all the aliases that match the pattern l=... or la=....

Answer 5

They do not produce the same output in all directories.

Create a dotfile with touch .whatever, then issue both la and ls.

Answer 6

la is an alias for ls -A, as stated by other answers. As such, it can't be used in shell scripts, while ls can.

Your computer has multiple aliased commands. A complete list can be obtained by executing alias. On my machine it prints this:

alias alert='notify-send --urgency=low -i "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo terminal || echo error)" "$(history|tail -n1|sed -e '\''s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/[;&|]\s*alert$//'\'')"'  
alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'  
alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'  
alias grep='grep --color=auto'  
alias l='ls -CF'  
alias la='ls -A'   
alias ll='ls -alF'   
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

--color=auto means colour will be turned off when not printing directly to STDOUT.