On Monday 21 June 2004 08:48 pm, Greg Black wrote: > On 2004-06-21, Leo Bicknell wrote: > > While I think the particular sort order (current behavior vrs non > > nano patch vrs nano patch) is largely unimportant, I think consistency > > is very important. It's quite common to do things like using diff > > on the output of commands like ls (indeed, I think several of the > > built in periodic scripts to this), and for that having a _reproduceable_ > > order is important. > > The output of ls has never been good for reproduceable output > for identical data. It frequently leads to gigantic "diffs" in > periodic reports which makes them useless, as far as I can > tell. Take the following case: > > $ mkdir foo > $ touch foo/a > [1] $ ls -l foo > total 0 > -rw-r--r-- 1 gjb gjb 0 Jun 22 10:25 a > $ touch foo/b > [2] $ ls -l foo > total 0 > -rw-r--r-- 1 gjb gjb 0 Jun 22 10:25 a > -rw-r--r-- 1 gjb gjb 0 Jun 22 10:26 b > $ sudo chown nobody foo/a > [3] $ ls -l foo > total 0 > -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody gjb 0 Jun 22 10:25 a > -rw-r--r-- 1 gjb gjb 0 Jun 22 10:26 b > > If we diff the output of ls[1] and ls[2], we'll get a useful > answer that shows us that "b" was added. > > But if we diff ls[2] and ls[3], it will appear as though every > entry has changed, although only "b" has. When this happens in > big directories, the consequences are astonishingly bad.
diff -b -- John Baldwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ "Power Users Use the Power to Serve" = http://www.FreeBSD.org _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
