Date:        Fri, 28 Dec 2001 00:13:57 -0500
    From:        "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>
    Message-ID:  <20011228051358.137657B56@berkshire.research.att.com>

  | Mine only puts out the times -- inode and size are easy enough to get 
  | from ls, as are owner and group.  To me, the important thing is a 
  | format that's easily parseable by scripts.

Exactly.  No-one really needs an even more verbose "ls" output.  Though
parsing ls output is never really what one ought to be doing, it is too
likely to undergo random changes to make it "look better".

So mine prints exactly whatever is asked for in whatever format is requested
(though I've yet to add a way to give it strftime formats for date printing).

Alternatively (to make things really easy for scripts), it prints everything
in the form of var assignments (eval `stat -g file`) using mostly numeric
output rather than symbolic.

kre