what's with that trailing "." for the mode from "ls -l"

Bryn M. Reeves bmr at redhat.com
Thu Nov 12 14:01:42 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 07:45 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 07:23 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > i once knew this, really.  what's the explanation of that recent
> > > introduction of an extra period after the normal mode bits in the
> > > output from "ls -l"?
> >
> > Let me google that for you:
> >
> > http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ls+dot+permissions
> 
>   a followup question would be, is there an ls option that would
> *prevent* that security setting character from being printed?  i ask
> since i'm working with a software project (openembedded) that
> specifically takes a mode setting in symbolic mode (from the output of
> "ls -l"), and uses sed to translate it to numeric mode, and the script
> to do that doesn't take into account that potential trailing period
> and promptly converts, say, "-rwxr-xr-x." to the string "755.", which
> then causes the subsequent call to install to crash with a bad numeric
> mode argument.

Not that I know of. The "What information is listed" node of the ls info
pages describes the characters used to indicate alternate access methods
when listing files with '-l' but does not mention a way to suppress
this.

Regards,
Bryn.





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