12 Mar
2020
12 Mar
'20
6:53 a.m.
On Thu, 12 Mar 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
On Wednesday, 11 March 2020 at 14:18:08 +1100, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
I went through all the switches defined by POSIX, and figured that those
26 could be cut down. My concept reduced the number of switches from 26
to 9 (FLRadfiln). Of course, the idea is to be more minimalist than
POSIX, so some people's opinions on what is or isn't necessary may differ
from mine.
Of course, this changes the default behavior of ls because it no longer
would be able to do columnar listings (|column for that).
I felt -A was a redundant "almost -a".
I felt -C and -x were redundant because a tool like column(1) could be
used to do the same job (even though column(1) isn't POSIX).
I felt -H was a redundant "almost -L".
I felt -S, -r and -t could be implemented in other ways using sort(1).
I felt -c and -u were meaningless, but that's because of the filesystems I
usually work with that do not have functional equivalents. -u for one is
completely useless on VFAT even though it has such timestamps! YMMV.
I felt -g and -o could be replaced by cut(1).
I felt -k wasn't really all that important. Just halve the numbers.
I felt -m wasn't really all that important. There's other ways to convert
to that format, no doubt, through filters.
I felt -p was a redundant "almost -F".
I felt -q could be done just fine with something like tr(1).
I felt -s was a redundant "kindasorta -l".
And -1 becomes the new default, so it's redundant. ;)
Again, YMMV. ;)
-uso.
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. Note that you can't do it the other way round:
you can't get the exact size from -h output.
And then there's the question why you don't like the standard output.
Because the number strings are too long and difficult to read, maybe?
That's the rationale for the -, 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.
Greg
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