Re: [coreutils] Bug: ls --tabsize=4

[James Youngman]

[re-adding the mailing list; sending mail to me directly about
coreutils is useless; I am just a bystander]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Philip Ganchev <address@hidden> wrote:

> Oh, I assumed that ls prints spaces to tabulate the output, as the
> manual mentions nothing about tab *characters*.  That seemed the
> simplest explanation, and other users may be similarly misled.
>
> So I think the manual ought to mention that ls outputs tab characters,
> that those tab characters may be displayed at various tab widths by
> the terminal (or terminal emulator), and that therefore ls needs to
> know where the tab stops are in the terminal.

Personally I didn't have this particular confusion, so I would suggest
that you are in a better position than I to improve the documentation
in this sense.   Would you like to propose a specific patch to the
Texinfo documentation to explain this better?

> Why does ls produce tab characters instead of spaces?

I don't know.   But the documentation does explain how to turn that off.

>  With
> fixed-width fonts spaces are much more robust to formatting errors
> like this.  Then the user would not need to worry about how her
> terminal (emulator) outputs spaces.

I've never turned off tabs in ls, but it seems that this might work
better for you.

>  And, she may prefer different tab
> sizes for different programs.

IMHO then she is doomed to a certain background level of frustration.
 Tab sizes are a property of the terminal, about which one informs the
system in order to make text output appear correct.   Trying to do
that whole thing backwards (i.e. telling different programs different
things about the properties of the terminal they all use) is likely
not to work optimally.

James.