ec2ls

bmc ec2ls lists all EC2 instances in the current AWS profile.

Usage #

bmc ec2ls            # Display as interactive table
bmc ec2ls --txt      # Output as aligned plain text without borders
bmc ec2ls --txt --no-headers   # Same, without the header line
bmc ec2ls --json     # Output as JSON array

Table output #

The table columns are configurable via ec2.columns in ~/.config/bmc/config.json. See Configuration.

Plain text output #

--txt prints the same columns as the table, aligned with spaces but without border lines. This makes the output easy to process with grep, awk and friends:

bmc ec2ls --txt | grep running | awk '{print $1}'

Add --no-headers to omit the header line, so every line is an instance (--no-headers requires --txt):

bmc ec2ls --txt --no-headers | grep -w running | awk '{print $1}'

Empty values (such as a missing public IP) are written as spaces, so whitespace-splitting tools like awk see fewer fields on those lines. Select on content (as above) or use --json with jq when you need a specific column reliably.

Messages such as an MFA refresh prompt go to stderr, so only the header and instance rows end up in the pipe. --txt and --json cannot be combined.

JSON output #

--json outputs all instances as a JSON array with AWS PascalCase keys, ignoring the columns config:

[
  {
    "InstanceId": "i-0abc123",
    "Name": "prod-web-01",
    "PrivateIpAddress": "10.0.1.5",
    "PublicIpAddress": "",
    "State": "running",
    "Hibernate": "no",
    "Scheduler": "yes",
    "Profile": ""
  }
]

All fields are always present. Pipe into jq for filtering:

bmc ec2ls --json | jq '.[] | select(.State == "running") | .Name'