When I do ls -l | grep ^d it lists only directories in the current directory.
What I'd like to know is what does the caret ^ in ^d mean?
2 Answers
Andy's answer is correct, as seen in the man page:
Anchoring
The caret ^ and the dollar sign $ are meta-characters that respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a line.
The reason it works is the -l flag to ls makes it use the long-listing format. The first thing shown in each line is the human-readable permissions for the file, and the first character of that is either d for a directory or - for a file
That's a caret, not a carrot. It means "beginning of the line." The grep is matching only lines that start with "d".
ls */instead, which will work with or without the long listing (ls -l) and without needinggrep(and thus is very slightly faster) and is less likely (thanls -l *) to run into an argument list too long issue (since it puts just directories into the command line). Of course,find . -maxdepth 1 -type dis even better, as it doesn't clutter your command line at all.