bin/54784: find -ls wastes space

[Andy Farkas]

The following reply was made to PR bin/54784; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Andy Farkas <andyf at speednet.com.au>
To: Peter Pentchev <roam at ringlet.net>
Cc: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: bin/54784: find -ls wastes space
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 02:34:01 +1000 (EST)

 On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Peter Pentchev wrote:
 
 > In the past, people have objected strongly to changing the output of
 > ps(1) for exactly this reason.  IMHO, there are several reasons not
 > to rely on whitespace in parsing the output of ls(1) or find(1);
 > for a trivial, though somewhat rare, example, consider whitespace in
 > the localized representation of date and time.
 
 If there are objections, I'd like to hear the reasons. I think if you are
 relying on a fixed-width formatted string returned from a utility, then
 you are relying on the wrong thing.
 
 > Other than that, there might be the human problem of comparing the
 > output of 'find' run on different machines with different usernames,
 
 Different machines may have different values of UT_NAMESIZE. A human
 comapring two lists would be able to compensate.
 
 > or even on the same machine, different directories owned by different
 > users; the columns, and sometimes line continuations, would be all out
 > of whack.
 
 No. The computed value of namelength is same for all users on the same
 machine.
 
 --
 
  :{ andyf at speednet.com.au
 
         Andy Farkas
     System Administrator
    Speednet Communications
  http://www.speednet.com.au/