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

[Robert P. J. Day]

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.

  right now, an easy solution is to just manually strip the trailing
period in every such case, but it would be easier to replace the
invocation of "ls" with one that just didn't list that period in the
first place.  i don't see such an option in "man ls" or "info ls".
does one exist?

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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