Benno Schulenberg wrote:
Fourth, the first part of the comment begins with this:
The instances of "s" in the following formats are
the SI symbol "s" (meaning second), and should not be translated.
Why should they not be translated? In order to avoid problems
with grammatical congruence in languages like Polish?
Yes. This is part of the SI standard. SI abbreviations are supposed to be
identical in all languages, regardless of grammar issues.
It would be nicer to use a fixed number of
decimals so that the message doesn't unnecessarily "jump".
Yes, and since the messages you're talking about are supposed to come out once a
second, dd should just omit everything after the decimal point.
Sixth, the format string uses %g, which means that the
number of seconds will be displayed in exponential form
when the number becomes very large. Is that intentional?
Yes, it's been that way since that code was introduced in 2004 (before
status=progress was added). The idea I had back then was that we want more than
1 digit when transfer times are short, and that we needn't bother with lots of
digits when transfer times are long. I've never heard of a real-world situation
where the exponential notation actually gets used (more than 11 days for the
transfer, if I calculate aright) so the issue is to some extent academic.
Thanks for your other comments. I installed the attached patch, which I hope
addresses them.
From fa9510a8bba71fc468694ae81ccdfe45bc1814e3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:06:00 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] dd: status=progress outputs "6 s", not "6.00001 s"
Problem reported by Benno Schulenberg (Bug#26621).
* NEWS: Document this.
* src/dd.c (print_xfer_stats): With status=progress,
format times with %.0f rather than %g. Improve
translator comments.
---
NEWS | 4 ++++
src/dd.c | 47 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------
2 files changed, 37 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-)
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 07cb283..72981b6 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -4,6 +4,10 @@ GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
** Bug fixes
+ dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
+ consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
df non longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
specifying -x nfs will no longer hang with problematic nfs mounts.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
diff --git a/src/dd.c b/src/dd.c
index 8ab1efa..119f307 100644
--- a/src/dd.c
+++ b/src/dd.c
@@ -795,29 +795,48 @@ print_xfer_stats (xtime_t progress_time)
if (progress_time)
fputc ('\r', stderr);
- /* TRANSLATORS: The instances of "s" in the following formats are
- the SI symbol "s" (meaning second), and should not be translated.
+ /* Use full seconds when printing progress, since the progress
+ report is output once per second and there is little point
+ displaying any subsecond jitter. Use default precision with %g
+ otherwise, as this provides more-useful output then. With long
+ transfers %g can generate a number with an exponent; that is OK. */
+ char delta_s_buf[20];
+ snprintf (delta_s_buf, sizeof delta_s_buf,
+ progress_time ? "%.0f" : "%g", delta_s);
+
+ /* TRANSLATORS: Because SI symbols should be the same in all
+ languages, the instances of "s" in the following formats, which
+ are the SI symbol "s" (meaning second), should not be translated.
The strings use SI symbols for better internationalization even
- though they may be a bit more confusing in English. If one of
- these formats A looks shorter on the screen than another format
- B, then A's string length should be less than B's, and appending
- strlen (B) - strlen (A) spaces to A should make it appear to be
- at least as long as B. */
+ though they may be a bit more confusing in English.
+
+ These strings should be translated so that a new output line B
+ completely overwrites an old line A that is already present on
+ the screen, if (sB < sA ? sA - sB : 0) spaces are appended to B,
+ where sA == strlen (A) and sB == strlen (B). For example, in a
+ UTF-8 locale where A is "8 bajtů zkopÃrováno, 1 s, 0 kB/s" (32
+ columns, strlen 35) and B is "19979567104 bajtů (20 GB, 19 GiB)
+ zkopÃrováno, 2 s, 10.0 GB/s" (61 columns, strlen 64), the
+ translation is OK because A looks shorter than B (32 vs 61
+ columns) even when no spaces are appended. */
int stats_len
= (abbreviation_lacks_prefix (si)
? fprintf (stderr,
- ngettext ("%"PRIuMAX" byte copied, %g s, %s/s",
- "%"PRIuMAX" bytes copied, %g s, %s/s",
+ /* TRANSLATORS: See comments in dd.c's print_xfer_stats. */
+ ngettext ("%"PRIuMAX" byte copied, %s s, %s/s",
+ "%"PRIuMAX" bytes copied, %s s, %s/s",
select_plural (w_bytes)),
- w_bytes, delta_s, bytes_per_second)
+ w_bytes, delta_s_buf, bytes_per_second)
: abbreviation_lacks_prefix (iec)
? fprintf (stderr,
- _("%"PRIuMAX" bytes (%s) copied, %g s, %s/s"),
- w_bytes, si, delta_s, bytes_per_second)
+ /* TRANSLATORS: See comments in dd.c's print_xfer_stats. */
+ _("%"PRIuMAX" bytes (%s) copied, %s s, %s/s"),
+ w_bytes, si, delta_s_buf, bytes_per_second)
: fprintf (stderr,
- _("%"PRIuMAX" bytes (%s, %s) copied, %g s, %s/s"),
- w_bytes, si, iec, delta_s, bytes_per_second));
+ /* TRANSLATORS: See comments in dd.c's print_xfer_stats. */
+ _("%"PRIuMAX" bytes (%s, %s) copied, %s s, %s/s"),
+ w_bytes, si, iec, delta_s_buf, bytes_per_second));
if (progress_time)
{
--
2.7.4
