Re: ls default time style

[Paul Jarc]

"Eli Zaretskii" <address@hidden> wrote:
> From: address@hidden (Paul Jarc)
>>> Emacs already has all that; see ls-lisp.el.  It is used on systems
>>> where `ls' isn't a standard program.
>>>
>>> However, I don't really see how this can help solve the Dired
>>> problems.
>>
>> It makes the stat() information directly accessible to Emacs; Emacs
>> doesn't have to parse a date format that was meant for human
>> consumption.
>
> There's a misunderstanding here: Emacs does not parse `ls' output to
> know the file's stats.  It parses that because it needs to know where
> in the buffer does the file name begin.

Ok, but either way, an odd date format could complicate that parsing,
and that's one reason some date formats have not been used.
ls-lisp.el eliminates the need for that parsing.  So there's one less
reason to avoid hard-to-parse date formats.

> It needs to do that because all the Dired commands call a function
> that extracts the file name from the current line in the Dired
> buffer.  This is done long after `ls' already exited, so an
> alternative to that would be to store the raw info somewhere else,
> in some temporary buffer or some other data structure.

Text properties, maybe.


paul