On 7/24/22 01:48, Pádraig Brady wrote:
Well ls(1) was explicitly changed to assuming only positive, citing POSIX (though I can't see it in POSIX myself): https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/67ba4ac01
I vaguely recall being involved with that decades-old change. The POSIX requirement is here:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ls.html#tag_20_73_10 (look for "%u").
Also ls(1) can sort by size, which gives a little more credence to assuming positive only size.
I don't see why; negative sizes sort just as well as positive ones do.
For these reasons I would keep ls(1) as is (assuming positive). As for stat(1), it's now consistent with ls(1) which has some benefit. It is lower level though, so in my mind it might be better to output the raw value, especially since it's such an edge case. So I'd leave ls(1) as is, and I'll leave it up to you how to handle stat(1) given the above points.
Consistency is reasonably important here (as per the original bug report), so if those are the choices let's leave things as-is.
