Re: general coreutils feature requests

[Padraig Brady]

address@hidden wrote:
> Padraig Brady <address@hidden> [2002-10-14 15:16:25 +0100]:
>
> > du should have same color options as ls
> > tree (Steve Baker (address@hidden)) should be part
>
> [...I deleted items of which I really had no opinion...]
>
> > ls should have an option so that ls ""
> > prints a newline rather than
> > ls: : No such file or directory
> > This would allow you to group files in listings.
>
> Huh?  I completely disagree about ls "" producing a newline.  If you
> want to print a newline use either 'echo' or 'printf'.  But perhaps
> you could expand upon what you are thinking.  It was not clear to me.

Hmm, that (grouping) functionality should probably be part of xargs
(though there could be problems there if a group is larger than
the maximum number of args). What I was thinking was if you had
files like:

echo "g1a
g1b

g2a
g2b
g2c

g3a" | xargs ls -l

you would get:

.................. g1a
.................. g1b

.................. g2a
.................. g2b
.................. g2c

.................. g3a

> > od should support -tX (print hex in uppercase)
>
> There is always
>
>   tr '[[:lower:]]' '[[:upper:]]'

True, scrap that.

> > jot would be a very nice addition
> >
> > Really should be a --sort-algorithm=.... option
> > to sort, to allow you to add new ones cohesively.
> > One new algoithm that would be very nice is a
> > "filename" one that deals with . and [0-9] appropriately
> > in filenames.
>
> You are not thinking of something like the existing?
>
>   ls --sort=version

Yep, that's the one. Should be in sort if it's in ls
(and personally I wouldn't put any sorting in ls at all).
Also a randomize "sort" algorithm would be useful.

> > printf should provide higher level functions than stdio printf, including...
> > %h for 1234567 -> 1,234,567
> > %H for 1234567 -> 1.1M (diff options for base 10 and base 2)
> > It should lookup the locale for the decimal char etc.
> > perhaps %8 %2 etc, for arbitrary bases?
> > maybe %us for toupper, %ls for tolower?
> > implement %q and %b that bash does
> > maybe %S for shell quoting
> > '%3*s' '>' should print >>>
> > %z for length of string
>
> Wow, what a list!  Feel free to submit code patches to implement
> those.  They will need to go through a review.

:-) Might just do that.

Pádraig.