4 ms·

I'm under the impression that ls doesn't do very much. I'd expect it to be a small wrapper around libc. This is thousands of lines of rust with emphasis on com

I'm under the impression that ls doesn't do very much. I'd expect it to be a small wrapper around libc. This is thousands of lines of rust with emphasis on community building and ongoing development. There seems to be a disconnect between engineering effort and product here which doesn't totally make sense to me. I think I'll stay with ls.

hibbelig 2y ago
Challenge: which of the letters a to z and A to Z are NOT switches that modify the behavior of ls? I would guess that ls has at least 50 different behaviors based on the switches.
- st_goliath 2y ago
  > which of the letters a to z and A to Z are NOT switches that modify the behavior of ls? For GNU ls: e/E, j/J, V, K, M, O, P, W, y/Y and z are not used It uses all the other upper and lower case letters, along with digit 1 and has a hand full of long options without a corresponding short one. Edit: I double-checked the man page, I'm surprised how many are unused, I would have guessed that it uses all of them by now.
  - gumby 2y ago
    > For GNU ls: e/E, j/J, V, K, M, O, P, W, y/Y and z are not used Challenge accepted!
creshal 2y ago
eza's scope is much larger than ls's, and has tons of additional features. And IMO, that's sensible: ls is primarily an interactive tool (basically all uses of it in shell scripts are wrong), so adding more features that help users to better/more easily make sense of their directory listings is a net benefit, even if it makes the tool somewhat slower. Folder icons in the terminal may sound silly, but eza uses them to indicate empty folders, among others. Colour-coded file age/size columns make parsing a directory list faster. Git columns saved my many trips through gitignore / git status. And so on. And even through not particularly fast fuse-over-network connections it's still faster than I can type, which is more than good enough for an interactive CLI tool.
deleted 2y ago
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WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
> emphasis on community building Probably the first time ever I hear about a community built on a freaking directory listing tool.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Definitely the first time I've heard ambition, features & especially community used as a slight. Generally I think of most engineers I know in person as people receptive to improvements & gains. Yes they looks at costs/tradeoffs. But there feels like some strong rejectionistic / contrarianism / negativity that I wasn't expecting, that seems bizarre & antisocial to me, especially here as the top post.
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zokier 2y ago
ls is the archetypical example of unix gone wrong, and I think this was already widely discussed (and joked) about in early 90s (iirc unix haters had something about that). It should be just simple wrapper for readdir, but it grew into sprawling mess when it learned to stat the files too, which snowballed ls to have gazillion ways to handle all sorts of metadata

hibbelig 2y ago

Challenge: which of the letters a to z and A to Z are NOT switches that modify the behavior of ls? I would guess that ls has at least 50 different behaviors based on the switches.

st_goliath 2y ago
> which of the letters a to z and A to Z are NOT switches that modify the behavior of ls? For GNU ls: e/E, j/J, V, K, M, O, P, W, y/Y and z are not used It uses all the other upper and lower case letters, along with digit 1 and has a hand full of long options without a corresponding short one. Edit: I double-checked the man page, I'm surprised how many are unused, I would have guessed that it uses all of them by now.
- gumby 2y ago
  > For GNU ls: e/E, j/J, V, K, M, O, P, W, y/Y and z are not used Challenge accepted!

creshal 2y ago

eza's scope is much larger than ls's, and has tons of additional features. And IMO, that's sensible: ls is primarily an interactive tool (basically all uses of it in shell scripts are wrong), so adding more features that help users to better/more easily make sense of their directory listings is a net benefit, even if it makes the tool somewhat slower. Folder icons in the terminal may sound silly, but eza uses them to indicate empty folders, among others. Colour-coded file age/size columns make parsing a directory list faster. Git columns saved my many trips through gitignore / git status. And so on. And even through not particularly fast fuse-over-network connections it's still faster than I can type, which is more than good enough for an interactive CLI tool.

deleted 2y ago

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WesolyKubeczek 2y ago

> emphasis on community building Probably the first time ever I hear about a community built on a freaking directory listing tool.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Definitely the first time I've heard ambition, features & especially community used as a slight. Generally I think of most engineers I know in person as people receptive to improvements & gains. Yes they looks at costs/tradeoffs. But there feels like some strong rejectionistic / contrarianism / negativity that I wasn't expecting, that seems bizarre & antisocial to me, especially here as the top post.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

zokier 2y ago

ls is the archetypical example of unix gone wrong, and I think this was already widely discussed (and joked) about in early 90s (iirc unix haters had something about that). It should be just simple wrapper for readdir, but it grew into sprawling mess when it learned to stat the files too, which snowballed ls to have gazillion ways to handle all sorts of metadata