12 Mar
2020
12 Mar
'20
9:34 a.m.
On Thu, 12 Mar 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
Well, I think one or the other would be desirable. I figured -a was the
better to keep - since it shows all dotfiles where -A leaves off . and ..
.
Of course. ;)
<snip>
Perhaps true.
<snip>
On Wednesday, 11 March 2020 at 20:53:12 -0400, Steve
Nickolas wrote:
xD
I went through all the switches defined by POSIX,
and figured that
those 26 could be cut down.
A brave man to defy POSIX! I wasn't so brave, which is why we have
the -y option. 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.
OK, let's compare notes:
I felt -A was a redundant "almost -a".
Arguably -a could go too. The distinction seems arbitrary. 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).
Neither would this ls(1) be. -S isn't POSIX. And to implement it without an
option would mean
removing -h.
-h is a gnuism, isn't it?
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ls.html does
specify the -S switch. That's POSIX, isn't it?
As I mentioned earlier, -t can't be done by a
filter without
significantly modifying the timestamp output. That was my rationale
for the -D option, which allows sorting by an external filter.
Understandable.
Honestly if the date format weren't standardized as it were, I would've
standardized on "yyyy-mm-dd,mm:ss" - which wouldn't need special
processing in order to pump into 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 think this says more about your file systems than about the options.
I find both incredibly useful, and there's no easy way to get the
information elsewhere. stat(1) would be an option, but then that
could replace ls(1) completely. So, any others?
-G: Colorized output. I'd be *really* happy to get rid of this, but
it's not easy to instate with a filter, so I suppose there are
enough people who like it that it will have to stay.
-P: Seems only to be there to cancel a -H or -L.
-W: "Display whiteouts when scanning directories". I don't even
understand what that is.
I was using the link I referenced as my "standard", which doesn't have any
of those.
I can take or leave color ls. I don't like the GNU defaults because dark
blue is TOO dark on my default settings. I think the flags are adequate
to know what kind of file I'm dealing with.
-f: We haven't really discussed this one. If you
want to remove -S,
-r and -t, then arguably -f should become the default and be
-removed.
I used to use "dir|sort" a lot on PC DOS before it got "dir /o" in
5.0. I
wouldn't have a problem with removing sort from ls altogether.
<snip>
Of course, none of this will happen. But it is
interesting to think
about it. In particular, options like -g and -o, which are no longer
modern.
-uso.