Re: ls default time style

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Markus Kuhn <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 12:59:42 +0000
> 
> Admittedly, the "12-03" does not even conform strictly to ISO 8601:2000,
> which would require --12-03 if you omit the year

I considered doing it that way, but it would have cost two print
columns (and would be no less confusing to naive users :-), so I
omitted the "--".  Part of the motivation for the ISO style was to
save print columns; in some locales, the dates were way too wide.

I also dropped the ISO-required "T" between the date and time, as that
would have made the time stamp harder to read, and would have been
less compatible with existing 'ls' practice.

Perhaps there's some wiggle room in ISO 8601:2000 to let writers omit
the year if writers and readers agree, and similarly to omit the "T".
I don't have a copy of the standard to check (I'm too cheap to pay the
ISO's prices -- just _what_ are they thinking in _charging_ for these
standards? :-).

> Could the date field to occupy 14 characters?

Not normally.  There are not enough print columns.

However, there is an option to get the full time stamp if you don't
care about exceeding 80 columns:

$ ls --full-time /tmp/foo
-rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   eggert          2 2001-12-11 10:38:58.320998948 -0800 
/tmp/foo

This is on a Solaris 8 file system with nanosecond-resolution time stamps.