Subject: Re: bug#15828: behavior of ls -f

From: Bernhard Voelker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 07:21:25 +0100

On 11/08/2013 01:06 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 11/07/2013 09:34 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
>> I don't see an issue there.
> 
> Apart from inconsistency I suppose.
> 
> You're right that option order matters with GNU ls currently.
> It does not matter on FreeBSD at least, as there, -f does not
> turn off -l no matter which order they occur.
> 
> Comparing some other options that POSIX is more concrete about
> in combination with -f, consider -S. POSIX says that:
> "When -f is specified, any occurrences of the -r, -S, and -t options shall be ignored"
> Now GNU ls does put order significance on the -S option which you can
> see by running `/bin/ls -flS`, and that does seem to contravene POSIX.
> 
> But option order precedence issue is more general really.
> Guideline 11 in http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html
> states that order shouldn't matter, but we've backwards compat to
> worry about.  Also having later options override earlier ones
> does allow one to for example alias a default set of ls options,
> which one can later change as needed.

Thanks for the clarification.
It was a bit hard to understand without a live BSD system or
the actual commands including the output.

Thanks & have a nice day,
Berny