bin/54784: find -ls wastes space

[Peter Pentchev]

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

From: Peter Pentchev <roam at ringlet.net>
To: Andy Farkas <andyf at speednet.com.au>
Cc: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: bin/54784: find -ls wastes space
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:23:42 +0300

 On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 02:12:30AM +1000, Andy Farkas wrote:
 > On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Peter Pentchev wrote:
 >=20
 > > Would this not break existing scripts, which rely on the current
 > > fixed formatting?
 >=20
 > You think? Most scripts would use spaces as a field seperator, so reducing
 > the number of spaces shouldn't affect them.
 
 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.
 
 Other than that, there might be the human problem of comparing the
 output of 'find' run on different machines with different usernames, or
 even on the same machine, different directories owned by different
 users; the columns, and sometimes line continuations, would be all out
 of whack.
 
 G'luck,
 Peter
 
 --=20
 Peter Pentchev	roam at ringlet.net    roam at sbnd.net    roam at FreeBSD.org
 PGP key:	http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc
 Key fingerprint	FDBA FD79 C26F 3C51 C95E  DF9E ED18 B68D 1619 4553
 I am not the subject of this sentence.