Re: revised use of column space in "ls"

[Paul Eggert]

> Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 01:56:06 +0000
> From: Markus Kuhn <address@hidden>
> 
> Paul Eggert wrote on 2001-12-21 01:17 UTC:
> > We could also remove the trailing zeros from the fractional part of
> > the time stamp.
> 
> The proper way to handle this is to query the timer resolution R and
> then round to ceil(-log10(R / 1 s)) fractional second digits.

But the filesystem's resolution can differ from the timer resolution
on the local machine.  For example, it might be an NFS filesystem; or
perhaps the filesystem was created on a different machine and then the
disk was moved to the current one; or perhaps the OS was upgraded to a
new OS that supports higher-resolution time stamps.

I don't know any portable way to query a filesystem's time stamp resolution.

And even if we could query it, I'm not sure it would be wise to do so.
It's common for all the files in 'ls' output to be created by a
program that uses lower-resolution time stamps than those supported by
the filesystem.  So it might make sense for 'ls' to output the lower
time stamp resolution anyway, as the trailing zeros consume screen
space.