Re: ls -l --no-total

[James Youngman]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 10:06:23AM +0000, address@hidden wrote:
> Felipe Kellermann wrote:
> >On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 5:39am  +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> >
> >
> >>  > Did I mention ls should have a --no-total option
> >>  > to remove those annoying
> >>  > total 1120
> >>  > without needing to pipe to a filter.
> >>
> >>  Another possibility would be to output the `total' to stderr.
> >>
> >>The horror, why do people come up with these silly ideas?  `total
> >>NNNNN' is not a error message, and doesn't belong on stderr.
> >
> >
> >I've seen other programs printing only informative messages to stderr.
> >And doing a find + fgrep I can even see coreutils programs doing so.
> 
> bash is the one that annoys me most.
> It puts errors AND THE PROMPT to stderr.
> I's a very minimal patch to change this
> (allowing one to automatically colour all errors
> from bash and child programs red for e.g.),
> but it was rejected with no reason :-(

The POSIX specification requires that the prompt be issued to stderr:-

1468 PS1  Each time an interactive shell is ready to read a command, the value 
of this
1469      variable shall be subjected to parameter expansion and written to 
standard
1470      error. The default value shall be "$ ". For users who have specific 
additional
1471      implementation-defined privileges, the default may be another,
1472      implementation-defined value. The shell shall replace each instance 
of the
1473      character '!' in PS1 with the history file number of the next command 
to be
1474      typed. Escaping the '!' with another '!' (that is, "!!") shall place 
the literal
1475      character '!' in the prompt. This volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 
specifies
1476      the effects of the variable only for systems supporting the User 
Portability
1477      Utilities option.

I'm guessing that that is why your patch was rejected.

Regards,
James.