Re: Patch for long names

[Bob Proulx]

> ls truncates user and group names to 8 characters. This is wrong, as far
> as I understand, since the limit typically is 32 for usernames and 16 for
> group names.

It is very interesting to me that the traditional UNIX system has had
this limitation for 30 years and no one has noticed.  Of course user
names had always been limited to eight characters max and only
recently allowed to go beyond that.  And then suddenly in the last
month at least three different people have reported this as a problem!
One would almost suspect a conspiracy.  :-) Note that most commercial
UNIX vendor ls commands have this same behavior.

Whether is is wrong or not depends on if you expect the columns to be
maintained or not.  I expect to hear people report in the future that
it as a bug that the fields are not truncated as in traditional and
commercial versions in order to maintain column position.

> The included patch fixes this problem. Can it be included in
> future releases?

This has already been addressed in the development code track along
with other improvements.  The next test release will almost certainly
contain these improvements.

Thanks for the report.

Bob