UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hey y'all,
I need some help with the nitty gritty of the ls command.

-First off in the man pages in the -l mode the first character can be "door" can anyone tell me what a door is???

-also in the -l mode the first character can be "fifo"or"pipe" can anyone tell me what a this is???

-What exactly does the -f option do? in the man pages it states: "forces each argument to be interpreted as a directory and list the name found in each slot" can someone give me an example of this???

-Does anyone by any remote chance know how ls determines columns based on the COLUMNS environment variable??

When you do an 'ls -l' the first column of the output is 10 characters describing the type and permissions on the file. The first character is the type. If the file is a door this first character withh be 'D'. To quote the manual ...

"The Solaris doors library offers a fast reliable synchronous RPC mechanism between processes on the same host and between the kernel and a user space process"

see the door_create manual for more information.

Try the pipe manual page for information on named pipes.

The '-f' option simply causes the entries to be listed in the order they actually appear in the directory file as opposed to alphabetical or time order, for instance.

COLUMNS is just an environment variable that should be set by your terminal. ls uses it simply to determine the number of characters it can output before it needs to start a new line.

thanks I did read the man pages and understood everything except for door and pipe filetype. You answered my questions very well however with regards to the collumns I was more wondering about, given the number of columns, the scheme determined how many rows and actual columns would be used.
-Thanks

COLUMNS does affect a lot of utilities.
Try

Code:

ls -C
let COLUMNS=40
ls- -C
man ls

sorry another stupid ls question:
how is the -c option different from the -t option?
is the timestamp not going to be the same as the last modification of the i-node?
thanks