Re: Inconsistent list output

[Andreas Dilger]

On Sep 8, 2022, at 13:01, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 9/8/22 12:25, Ingo Brückl wrote:
>> I'm talking about the Unix
>> UserID/GroupID with a historical maximum of 8*characters*  each!
> 
> I see no such limit in 7th Edition Unix. The only limit I see is around 500 
> bytes for user and group names.

Ingo, on the flip side, what does it matter if the columns shift a bit in rare 
cases? 

Machine parsing should be using the space-separate field numbers as it couldn't 
rely on column width anyway, and for human readability the slight misalignment 
doesn't really matter much. 

The only "real" solution is to parse the entire archive to determine the 
maximum field width before showing anything, but that is a terrible solution 
because it can take a very long time to produce *any* output for large archives.

GNU "ls" has this unfortunate misfeature of reading the whole directory to 
read+stat every entry in a directory to determine field width before displaying 
anything (even if unsorted), and this is a real problem for large directories 
on a network filesystem. Please do not inflict this on tar. 

Cheers, Andreas