la accidentally instead ofls to view the contents of a directory and it produces exactly the same output asWhy is this? Surely it doesn't make sense to have two commands that do the exact same thing. Ask Ubuntu is a question and answer site for Ubuntu users and developers. It only takes a minute to sign up. Sign up to join this communityla is defined as an alias in Ubuntus~/.bashrc file together with a few others. la is simply anls -A as you can see in the following snippet from the# 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' la is an alias forls -A, as stated by other answers. As such, it can't be used in shell scripts, whileYour computer has multiple aliased commands. A complete list can be obtained by executingalias. 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.