12 Mar
2020
12 Mar
'20
6:42 a.m.
On Wednesday, 11 March 2020 at 19:14:32 -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
What I meant (and this is certainly my interpretation) was that
somebody added the -h option because of perceived pain with piping
output through another program. I didn't intend to imply that it was
the only alternative.
Yes, this is an issue that I mentioned in an earlier message (I added
a positional parameter to work around it). But this is in the nature
of the output. mc doesn't have this issue.
Hmm. In this particular case, so does Linux:
=== grog@bilbo (/dev/pts/11) ~ 2 -> touch "foo "
=== grog@bilbo (/dev/pts/11) ~ 4 -> l foo*
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog grog 1499570 Jun 30 2012 foo
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog grog 0 Mar 12 10:40 'foo '
I wonder if that's something we should emulate in FreeBSD. At the
very least we should consider whether the lack of identification of
trailing blanks is a bug in the FreeBSD implementation of -B. This
option isn't in POSIX, and in Linux it means
-B, --ignore-backups
do not list implied entries ending with ~
So maybe it's a candidate for fixing.
Greg
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On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 6:57 PM Greg
'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
It's certainly more work than -h.
On Wednesday, 11 March 2020 at 14:18:08 +1100,
Dave Horsfall wrote:
I don't know; that's subjective.
The "ls" command for example really needs an option-ectomy; I find that I
don't really care about the exact number of bytes there are in a file as
the nearest KiB or MiB (or even GiB) is usually good enough, so I'd be
happy if "-h" was the default with some way to turn it off (yes, I know
that it's occasionally useful to add them all up in a column, but that
won't tell you how many media blocks are required).
A good example. But you're not removing options, you're just
redefining them. In fact I find the -h option particularly emetic, so
a better choice in removing options would be to remove -h and use a
filter to mutilate the sizes:
$ ls -l | humanize
But that's a pain, isn't it? That's
why there's a -h option for people who like it.
That's incomplete, in that it implies that an option is the only way
to achieve the goal of reducing the perceived pain, but that's not
the case. (Note I'm not saying you intended that as an
interpretation, but it's a reasonable intuition for an intention.) An interesting counterpoint to this argument is how
columnized "ls"
is handled under Plan 9: there is no `-C` option to `ls` there;
instead, there's a general-purpose `mc` filter that figures out the
size of the window it's running in, reads its input, decides how
many columns the input will fit into, and emits it columnized. But
yes, it would be a pain to type `ls | mc` every time one wanted
columnized `ls` output, so this is wrapped up into a shell script
called `lc`. Note that this lets you do stuff like, `lc -l` and see
multi-column long listings if the window is wide enough.
Yes, that sounds like an excellent method.
For the `humanize` thing, I don't see why one
couldn't have an `lh`
command that generated "human-friendly long output from ls."
And yes, I deliberately didn't mention this option, though it occurred
to me. I have a couple of scripts like this, like:
alias l="ls -lbL,"
Note that you
can't do it the other way round: you can't get the
exact size from -h output.
That's true, but now the logic is specialized to ls, and not
applicable to anything else (e.g., du? df? wc, perhaps?). Similarly
with `-,`. It is not general purpose, which is unfortunate. Granted, combining these things would be a little
challenging, but is it
likely that one would want `ls -l,h`? Optimize for the common case,
etc....
Heh. Never thought of that. But since -h (apparently) never produces
output with 4 digits, the -, doesn't ever come into effect. I've just
tried it on some big files, and the -, is effectively ignored.
And then there's the question why you don't
like the standard
output.
I don't like the standard output because things like this are hard to
read:
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 8234010624 22 Mar 2012 Casanova-TV-1-5
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog home 13225168900 31 Aug 2019 Movie:_Sahara_2005-2016-04-11-2028
I find this easier to read:
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 8,234,010,624 22 Mar 2012 Casanova-TV-1-5
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog home 13,225,168,900 31 Aug 2019
Movie:_Sahara_2005-2016-04-11-2028
I can't speak for Dave, but this is also less painful:
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 7.7G 22 Mar 2012 Casanova-TV-1-5
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog home 12G 31 Aug 2019 Movie:_Sahara_2005-2016-04-11-2028
The problem for me there is the difficulty comparing lengths, and the
implicit inaccuracy.
Because the
number strings are too long and difficult to read, maybe?
That's the rationale for the -, option.
By default, plan9 would quote filenames that had characters that
were special to the shell (there wasn't really the concept of
"non-printable characters in the Unix/TTY sense); this could be
disabled by specifying the `-Q` option. Quickly now, without looking: which option shows
unprintable
characters in a filename? Unless you use it regularly (in which
case you have real problems) you would have to look it up; I find
that "ls ... | od -bc" to be quicker, especially on filenames with
trailing blanks etc (which "-B" won't show).
This is arguably a bug in the -B option. I certainly don't think the
pipe notation is quicker. But it's nice to have both alternatives.