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

Todd Zullinger tmz at pobox.com
Thu Nov 12 13:59:46 UTC 2009


Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 07:45 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
[...]
>>   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.

I would argue that scraping the ls output in this way is broken and
that openembedded is what should be fixed (using stat as Sanya
suggests is one good alternative).

-- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that
apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.
    -- George Carlin

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