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

[Jason Cooper]

Well, the directions said to send problems to the gentoo developers
before sending them upstream to the package owners, so I'll toss this
your way :)

I've been doing a lot of work with multi-GB files, and I use the command
'watch -n 3 ls -lR workdir/' while my script is ripping the dvd.  I do
_not_ want human-readable output, eg 'ls -lh' because the files are
different scales, some bytes, some kb, some gb, etc.  

Here is the problem: file sizes with more than eight digits make the
output not line up.  This is because 8 characters minimum is hard coded 
into the ls source.  So I changed the hard coded width to 10.  Here is 
the output before:

################old output##################
total 10504120
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         1163 Apr 24 10:39 dvd9to5.log
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     4200529896 Apr 24 10:39 movie.m2v
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     2040659968 Apr 24 10:42 movie.mpeg
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     295174144 Apr 24 10:34 ofile.ac3
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     4219849312 Apr 24 10:34 ofile.m2v


And the output after:

################new output##################
total 12989797
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root             96 Apr 24 10:47 dvd
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           1903 Apr 24 10:56 dvd9to5.log
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     4200529896 Apr 24 10:39 movie.m2v
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     4585990144 Apr 24 10:47 movie.mpeg
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      295174144 Apr 24 10:34 ofile.ac3
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     4219849312 Apr 24 10:34 ofile.m2v


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...  

TIA,

Cooper.

Patch attached.

diff -Nurd coreutils-5.0.91/src/ls.c coreutils-5.0.91.lsgb/src/ls.c
--- coreutils-5.0.91/src/ls.c 2003-07-27 02:33:36.000000000 -0400
+++ coreutils-5.0.91.lsgb/src/ls.c  2004-04-24 11:10:55.313158520 -0400
@@ -3008,7 +3008,7 @@
    are actually positive values that have wrapped around.  */
       size += (f->stat.st_size < 0) * ((uintmax_t) OFF_T_MAX -
OFF_T_MIN + 1);

-      sprintf (p, "%8s ",
+      sprintf (p, "%10s ",
          human_readable (size, hbuf, human_output_opts,
                1, file_output_block_size));
     }


--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list