I am the one who said that the postgresql I was using didn't act like any other one I have used before. Nothing seemed to fix it. Then I performed ls -C only to get a single column. So something really bad had happened. I reloaded Ubuntu 24.04 and now postgresql and ls are performing as advertised. I don't know what I did to my machine but it seemed totally messed up before I reloaded it. I am so glad that I have a very good files backup system. Thanks to all that replied to my first post.