/bin/ls sorting bug?

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 10:48 AM +1000 6/22/04, Greg Black wrote:
>
>The output of ls has never been good for reproduceable output
>for identical data.  It frequently leads to gigantic "diffs"
>in periodic reports which makes them useless, as far as I can
>tell.  Take the following case:

Hmm.  I never thought much about that before.

Perhaps we should use the output from the `stat' command for
all of these tests in the periodic scripts.  That way we could
pick an exact format.

Or maybe those scripts should take advantage of:
    LS_COLWIDTHS:
       If this variable is set, it is considered to be a colon-
       delimited list of minimum column widths.  Unreasonable
       and insufficient widths are ignored (thus zero signifies
       a dynamically sized column).  Not all columns have
       changeable widths.  The fields are, in order: inode,
       block count, number of links, user name, group name,
       flags, file size, file name.

Those might make the periodic checks more useful.  Which scripts
have this problem?  In a very quick check, I only noticed an `ls'
command in security/100.chksetuid.  Anything else?

Note that I am not volunteering to do the work, though...

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu