Subject: Re: bug#30717: i miss some ls-features
From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
To: kalle <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 15:16:27 -0600
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

tag 30717 notabug
thanks

On 03/05/2018 03:01 PM, kalle wrote:
> hello
> I wonder why for the ls-command I don't find the following features, I
> consider important:
> - list the size of files. For directories, list the total size of the
> tree beneath them

Because this feature is already provided by the 'du' tool.

> - for ls -R (recursive presentation) limit it to a certain depth
> greetings,

Because this feature is already provided by the 'find' tool.

One philosophy of Unix design is that each tool should do one thing 
well, rather than trying to repeat functionality already present elsewhere.

As such, I'm marking this as not a bug in the coreutils database, but 
you are welcome to continue conversation if you think you have strong 
arguments for changing ls.  Note that if there is an alternative 
implementation of ls (such as BSD ls) that does what you want via a 
particular command line option, then that is a much stronger argument 
for teaching coreutils ls to do the same thing.  But merely adding 
something to ls that can already be accomplished by another standardized 
tool is probably just going to be bloat to an already large 'ls' binary.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
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