Description
ELS is an Extensible LS work-alike with many additional features. Besides supporting most of what /bin/ls does, ELS also allows you to specify the output format so that any field can be listed in any order. In addition to supporting the traditional /bin/ls time format, ELS allows you to list files with *both* time and year regardless of age, ISO-8601 format (i.e. YYYYMMDD.hhmmss format), age of file (i.e. the number of days, weeks, months, years, etc. ago the file was created), European style, etc. ELS allows you to specify absolute file paths and names so that the output can be further manipulated by /bin/sort, etc. ELS has a built-in checksumming ability so that files can be listed along with their checksums. ELS has a untouch facility which will allow you to recover the modification dates following a touch.
Other features of ELS are that it allows you to specify the format of your output using the generic format (+G), it allows you to specify the time format (+T), and it allows you to specify the filename format (+N). ELS also allows you to filter your output using wildcards and/or boolean expressions to generate listings based on each file's name, date, size, type, mode, permission, ownership, etc.
ELS will even display the dates of files created after Jan 19 03:14:08 2038 GMT (assuming that the future standard will treat the 32-bits used by Unix's present-day file system as unsigned).
The reason that ELS was originally written was so that consistent dates could be generated and saved into a file and that these dates could be compared at a later date to determine which files had changed. /bin/ls is unsuited for this purpose as sometimes it lists the date/time and other times it lists the date/year depending on the age of the file. ELS always lists the date/year/time regardless of when the file was created.