Re: suggestion for 'ls' coreutil, comma'd filesizes in -l output (original) (raw)

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From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: suggestion for 'ls' coreutil, comma'd filesizes in -l output
Date: Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:01:42 -0600
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On 06/04/2013 11:23 AM, smu johnson wrote:

Dear coreutils email maintainer,

I have a suggestion for 'ls'. My idea is a GNU extension switch which commafies (for lack of a better word) the filesizes in the basic -l output of integers. This has been the default for 'dir' since MS-DOS, but I think it might be a good addition for an optional switch in 'ls', in which case i'd "enable it" by making / modifying my alias for 'ls'.

Right now I use a frontend for 'ls' written in Perl to do the same job, but as you can probably guess, the solution is a bit cludgey and likely prone to fail down the road. But right now, its output is:

sjohnson@web1:/tmp/sjohnson$ ls -l test* -rw-r--r-- 1 sjohnson sjohnson 13,824 2012-12-10 13:32 test1.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 sjohnson sjohnson 9,973 2012-12-10 12:13 test.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 sjohnson sjohnson 71 2013-04-10 17:49 test.txt

Any thoughts or comments greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading.

More generically, if we had a --format argument that allowed you to use % tokens for all elements to be listed, then you can use a printf-style ' modifier in the element that lists file size, as well as any other tweak you want to make in the line layout.

In fact, stat already has that:

$ stat -c "%'s" COPYING HACKING 35,147 24,005

-- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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