Emergency UNIX and Linux Support

It is your choice :
- Modify a system that works to make it behave as expected with poorly coded scripts
or
- Fix your poorly coded scripts to make it behave as expected on a system that works

IMO you should obviously choose that second option .

I am very sorry to tell you that leaving bad code just because there are numerous (i.e. because of lazyness) is a VERY BAD reason ... in my opinion

So the best piece of advice i can give you is : yes, you need to fix ALL the scripts in which you use such a way of getting datas

This is an opportunity to improve your code, too. If there's numerous places this is used, you could get rid of a lot of redundancy by having that done by one thing which everything else calls or sources instead of having that routine duplicated in 17 different scripts.

Hi.

There are 3 work-alike codes for utility ls at the perl power tools page:

Code:

http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/CWEST/ppt-0.14/html/commands/ls/index.html

I downloaded and tried them all on & with:

Code:

aix 5.1.0.0
perl 5.6.0

One was missing a perl module ( Stat/lsMode.pm ), but all compiled and the other 2 ran, although one had a strange output for option "-l". The one that ran correctly compared favorably with the native ls, but not exactly as regards spacing.

So if you wanted to modify ls output with a project-specific code in perl, you could.

However, I agree with many of the others, and suggest that you clean up your scripts. Counting on specific locations in a line for a datum is a very fragile technique, as you have found.

Good luck with whatever decision you make ... cheers, drl

Write your own, ls is just a wrapper for dirent and stat. JAVA or PERL might be nicer than C/C++!

Hi all,

Thank you. Surely I need to modify my code. But I am curious to know if there is a way that we can set the 'ls -l' command dispaly format or it never possible in unix?

Thanks
Punitha.S

Without having to get into re-coding the ls command you could just format it, as per DGPicket's suggestion :

Code:

ls -l | sed 's/ /  /'

Either that, or use awk, capture every field, and format them the way you like, adjusting for old files and sym-links.