Re: [gentoo-dev] coreutils patch for 'ls -l' of GB files

[Drake Wyrm]

On Sat, 2004-04-24, 17:55:03 -0400, in <20040424215503.GC14678@××××××××××.net>, Jason Cooper <gentoo@××××××××××.net> wrote:
> Daniel Drake (dsd@g.o) scribbled:
> > Jason Cooper wrote:
> >
> > >So my question for you guys is this:  Should I submit this to the
> > >coreutils owner?  It's stupid simple, literally a one-line patch.  I'd
> > >make it a command line option, but I think they left it hard-coded for a
> > >reason...

Probably the same reason programmers used two-digit years for so long.
"This will work for now. I'll fix it later, before it becomes a
problem." What was the largest hard drive available in 1985? Files
larger than 95 GB were never going to happen...

> > If you make your new behaviour default, you may break many peoples scripts
> > that expect the size column to be 8 characters long.

Files larger than 99999999 bytes will also break scripts which depend
on an 8-character size column.

> > My opinion is that your modification should become accessible only through
> > a non-default commandline parameter.
>
> Agreed, would an "auto-adjusting width" be a worthwhile endevour?  It
> seems kind of pointless to add a commandline option just to increase the
> column width two characters, not to mention temporary (tera/peta-byte size
> files?).  A more robust solution would be for the option to allow the
> column width to shrink and grow based on the largest file in the list.

Frankly, an "auto-adjusting width" should probably be the default. It
should not break anything which grabs the fifth space-separated field,
and anything which grabs characters 35 through 42 is broken, anyway.

Thinking from another point of view, the output from `ls -l` is intended
for human consumption. Robust scripts which need to determine the size
of a file (should) use `stat -c %s`.

-- 
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"?
Kusanagi: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action.
  --Ghost in the Shell