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.