/bin/ls -C Question
Carl Lowenstein
cdl at mplvax.ARPA
Fri Feb 21 01:19:27 AEST 1986
In article <337 at chinet.UUCP> megabyte at chinet.UUCP (Mark E. Sunderlin) writes:
>Ok, here is my question to the net. Why does ls -C Sometimes
>NOT print across the screen?
>But some times a directory will list one per line on me. What does
>ls make this decision on? I have seen this behavior on both at&t 3b2
>machines and on Tandy 6000 machines. (sys V on one Xenix 3 on the latter)
This seems to be the now-famous SysV 14-character filename bug. Directories
have exactly 14 bytes allocated for the file name, so a full-length name
can't have a null terminator. When ls(1) tries to compute the number
of columns to use for the -C option it gets some ridiculously long length
for one of the file names, and gives up and uses a single column.
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
{ihnp4|decvax|akgua|dcdwest|ucbvax} !sdcsvax!mplvax!cdl
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