bin/54784: find(1) -ls wastes space

[Oliver Fromme]

Bruce Evans wrote:
 > On Thu, 29 Jul 2010 jilles at FreeBSD.org wrote:
 > 
 > > Synopsis: find(1) -ls wastes space
 > > 
 > > State-Changed-From-To: open->closed
 > > State-Changed-By: jilles
 > > State-Changed-When: Thu Jul 29 23:24:55 UTC 2010
 > > State-Changed-Why:
 > > I don't think there is a good way to fix this.
 > > Iterating over all users with getpwent() may be very slow or may not work
 > > at all in some environments.
 > > I don't see another way to find the column widths. Buffering all output
 > > would be rather annoying as well.
 > 
 > It certainly gives unreadable output.  And didn't someone want to bloat
 > UT_NAMESIZE to 256 or so, so that only users with 400-column terminals
 > could read the output?

I'm afraid I have to agree with Jilles here.  I don't think
many people actually read the output from find -ls.

Personally I only use find -ls in scripts, although recently
I'm tempted to use "find ... | xargs stat" instead because
stat(1) provides much more flexibility regarding the output
format, so the script doesn't have to do as much parsing
itself.  On the other hand, find -ls exists for MUCH longer
and is more portable.

If I actually want to read ls-like output on the screen,
I use "find | xargs ls -...".

I also *strongly* agree with Jilles that find(1) should not
buffer all output.  This could possibly break some scripts
or at least make them run slower and less efficient.

 > I didn't know that find -ls existed, and would use xargs :-).

I did know that it exists, and I do use xargs.  :-)
(Well, at least for output that's supposed to be read by
humans.  Scripts are a different story.)

Best regards
   Oliver

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