Jim Meyering writes: > > I'm thinking of making -k comply, but letting any block-size > specification (via --block-size= or an envvar) override that > to give the behavior we've seen for the last 9 years. >
Wow, look what I stirred up. If it's been like this for 9 years, it's been broken for 9 years. As I said originally, BSD is the standard that matters here. It doesn't matter when or even whether POSIX blessed the -k option. Everywhere except GNU, this is simple. The size field of the ls -l output is not defined in terms of blocks, so the block size setting doesn't affect it. Numbers derived from st_blocks are reported in units of blocks, and others aren't. If you're going to define --block-size to have this effect, then you really need to document it as being an option that does 2 separate things: 1. sets the size of a block 2. alters the definition of the -l format -- Alan Curry
