/bin/ls -C Question the ANSWER!
Ken Latham
latham at bsdpkh.UUCP
Sun Feb 23 17:14:48 AEST 1986
> Ok, here is my question to the net. Why does ls -C Sometimes
> NOT print across the screen? Most of the time when I enter
> a ls -C I get a nice diretory like:
> News fvps.c h19 mbox vps.c
> But some times a directory will list one per line on me. What does
> ls make this decision on?
We have been having this problem for a while now, it suddenly struck me
the other day. When ever I changed names of files created by vnews the
problem went away... AHA I thought ... control charaters in the names
^h's maybe not getting filtered out and causing problems with an unprepared
"ls" command.
Alas, This wasn't it .... od -c revealed the problem
every time a 14 character name showed up "ls" would list one per line.
I get rid of the 14 character names and all is fine.
Conclusion:
"ls" believes that 14 character names won't fit well across the
page...so he lists 1/line. actually 5 16-charater names will fit ....
this would work for 14-char name, a 1-char designator and 1-space separator
( who ever wrote ls must not be very good at math :-) )
This is under sysv on 3b[25],
Ken Latham, AT&T-IS (via AGS Inc.), Orlando , FL
uucp: ihnp4!bsdpkh!latham
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