Re: Alignment bug in ls with UTF-8 filenames under Mac OS X

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2007-01-18 17:39:40 +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> The --color option also has the effect of turning tabs into spaces;
> yet this is undocumented. Actually the doc states
> 
>      `ls' uses tabs where possible in the output, for efficiency.  If
>      COLS is zero, do not use tabs at all.
> 
> and the phrase "where possible" is vague enough. It is not possible
> to use tabs with --color, and it is not possible to use tabs after
> non-ASCII characters.

BTW, it shouldn't use tabs when the output does not correspond to a
terminal. For instance, the user may want to send the file by mail
or may want to indent it. Incorrect results can be obtained if there
are tabs.

A solution could be to have tabsize set to 0 by default. For users
who need 8 (or some other value) because of a slow network (without
compression, since a sequence of spaces should be compressed) could
change its value.

> Vincent, do you have time to report that to the Apple people? No need to
> mention 'ls' - a simple
> 
>   printf 'E\xcc\x81\t2nd column\nFoo\t2nd column\n'
> 
> should be all you need to demonstrate the bug. I'm not in such a good
> position to report it, since I'm using an older version of MacOS X.

Done. FYI, the ID is 4940781 (but since the bug reports are not public,
I doubt this ID is useful). However I have reported several bugs for
more than a year, and none of them are fixed.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <address@hidden> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)