Re: revised use of column space in "ls"

[Markus Kuhn]

Paul Eggert wrote on 2001-12-21 00:25 UTC:
>    $ ls -l .plan .profile today
>    -r--r--r--    1 eggert   eggert        386 1981-07-14 .plan
>    -r--r--r--    1 eggert   eggert       4012 2001-11-20 .profile
>    -rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   eggert          0   16:10:01 today
>
> This would conform better to ISO 8601, because it would avoid the
> nonconforming "MM-DD" notation that bothers Mr. Haible and Mr. Kubota.
> Also, it saves one precious print column.  I would like to hear
> reactions to this idea.

I still favour the use of a single full date and time, independent of
the age of the file, just as MS-DOS DIR did. Column space is not as
precious today any more as it was on a Type 55 teletyper in 1972, on
which ls was written. Today, most users have more screen space than what
fits onto an IBM punch card. I want to know frequently, which of two 8
week old files is 10 seconds older than the other, for dependency
checks.

OK, let's rethink the ls -l output from scratch:

Since "ls" has to read the entire directory in for sorting anyway, why
not save column space by adapting the column widths to the actually
needed widths, just as <TABLE> in HTML does?

Thanks to MPEG, databases, and the great harddisk inflation, the file
sizes are today also significantly larger than what was common in 1972.
That column width definitely also needs adjustment, whereas I always
fould the width for the link count somewhat too generous. The entire
link count is probabaly redundant for most users, since multiple hard
links are quite rarely used. Using a different colour for multi-linked
files that are not directories would be far more informative and free
another 5 precious columns that could go towards the full date notation
and more space for the file size.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>