How can I make "ls" show dotfiles first?

⚠️ This answer is a little dated. Please check out the other answers, particularly those using aliases or ls -v.

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Try adding

export LC_COLLATE="C"

in your dotfiles, or changing the LC_ALL assignment to:

export LC_ALL="C"

This controls the way sorting on character level works — while the default would be to sort dotfiles inline, this will make sort list dotfiles first.

However, note that this will basically stop support for your actual locale across all locale-aware utilities.

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To go further, quoting the GNU Coreutils manual (emphasis mine):

If you use a non-POSIX locale (e.g., by setting LC_ALL to en_US), then sort may produce output that is sorted differently than you're accustomed to.

In that case, set the LC_ALL environment variable to C. Note that setting only LC_COLLATE has two problems. First, it is ineffective if LC_ALL is also set. Second, it has undefined behavior if LC_CTYPE (or LANG, if LC_CTYPE is unset) is set to an incompatible value. For example, you get undefined behavior if LC_CTYPE is ja_JP.PCK but LC_COLLATE is en_US.UTF-8.

To avoid any system wide changes without real need, one can change only the way how ls works for the current user by adding the alias to the .bashrc:

alias ll='LC_COLLATE=C ls -alF'

This sorts dot files first, allows to properly handle (show and sort) "uncommon" character sets like cyrillic. The only culprit that the sorting will be case-sensitive.

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=816753

The ls(1) manpage lists:

-v natural sort of (version) numbers within text

This seems change how periods are sorted and does group dotfiles first. I have:

alias ls='ls -vAF'
alias ll='ls -l'

in my ~/.bashrc.