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Re: bone to pick with ls
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: bone to pick with ls |
Date: |
Wed, 21 Jul 2004 09:16:53 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux) |
Burt Smith <address@hidden> writes:
> If I now alias ls as 'ls -F', I get:
>
> % ls
> foo@
> % ls foo
> foo@
POSIX requires this behavior. See
<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/ls.html>
which says that -F does "not follow symbolic links named as operands
unless the -H or -L options are specified". I just checked OpenBSD
3.4 ls, and it agrees with GNU ls and POSIX here.
> Can I get someone to change this new behavior
> to an option and to restore the original behavior?
I think it's probably better to conform to POSIX by default here;
this particular problem isn't worth the hassle of nonconformance.
> Or alternately, to change the behavior of the new
> --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir to use the
> 'classic' manner (i.e. with ls -l it does NOT dereference
> unless -L is also present).
That sounds good to me. But shouldn't the name of that option be
changed in that case? Perhaps it should be renamed to
"--dereference-traditional" or something like that. Or, if someone
really likes the --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir behavior
the way it is, then we could add a new --dereference-traditional
option to cause the traditional behavior that you prefer.
I think I'll let Jim Meyering look into this one, as he knows more
about the underlying motivation for
--dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir. Please bug us about it
again if you don't hear anything for a couple of weeks, as it sounds
like a real annoyance for you. (I don't use -F much so I haven't run
into the problem.)