Re: misc/40977: /var/backups/work/device.current is overly sensitive to ls(1) columnar alignment

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR misc/40977; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
Cc: 
Subject: Re: misc/40977: /var/backups/work/device.current is overly sensitive 
to ls(1) columnar alignment
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 21:16:14 +0100

 On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 07:40:04PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
 >  Another approach is to forcibly set the column widths...  or just
 >  prune all column padding.
 ...
 >  The latter would give something like
 >  
 >                     -type b -o -type c \) -print0 | \
 >     -        xargs -0 ls -ldgTq | sort +9 > $LIST
 >     +        xargs -0 ls -ldgTq | sed 's/  */ /g' | sort +9 > $LIST
 >  
 >  although looking at this I am starting to have real doubts about that
 >  sort +9. It sorts the regular files and directories by name, but the
 >  devices by year...
 
 Perhaps: sed -e 's/  */ /g' -e 's/, /,/'
 
 However I'm 100% sure that spaces are guaranteed after user and group
 names (I've seen 'ls' that don't generate them for maximal length names).
 
 Not to mention the problems of spaces in user/group names and odd
 characters in filenames.
 
 So maybe 'ls -nb' should be used.
 (Netbsd's ls only seems to have gained -b recently!)
 
        David
 
 -- 
 David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost