The moment you pipe ‘ls’ it will fallback to using just one column. In fact a great deal of CLI tools (and particularly coreutils like GNU) will have nice usab

The moment you pipe ‘ls’ it will fallback to using just one column. In fact a great deal of CLI tools (and particularly coreutils like GNU) will have nice usability features this will auto-disable the moment the output file is not a TTY. For example, run the following commands and compare the output: ls ~ ls ~ | cat grep --color=auto ${hostname} /etc/hosts grep --color=auto ${hostname} /etc/hosts | cat You might be surprised at just how different and predictable the terminal utilities behave when they detect they’re being piped.