How to provide detailed listing of /tmp directory The standard options to ls are not working: I get the following

14:53:37/a2a $ls -l /tmp
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel  11 Jan  9 14:16 /tmp -&gt; private/tmp

$ls -lrta /tmp
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel  11 Jan  9 14:16 /tmp -&gt; private/tmp


The intent is to view  the contents of the directory, not the metadata info  it is a (hard?) link.

Note that ls /tmp does show the contents .. but not the detailed info like last modified

$ls /tmp
00f12e86-cfcc-4239-9dfc-006b65a319c3    com.symantec.symdaemon.launches
72f8fe65-e688-4d14-9aef-42c6abc1d4fa    exceptions.csv
835500b9-549b-435d-b444-97db8935fd88    ju.txt
 ..
com.symantec.avscandaemon.NF
As your ls -l /tmp shows /tmp is a symbolic link to private/tmp

So what you want is to replace tmp by what it is linked to e.g.

ls -l /private/tmp


or let ls do it for you using the -H option

ls -lH /tmp


man ls says


  -H      Symbolic links on the command line are followed.  This option is
               assumed if none of the -F, -d, or -l options are specified.


which explains whey ls with no options does show the contents of the directory that is linked to.