Re: ls color backwards compatibility

[Eric Blake]

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According to Mikel Ward on 1/28/2008 10:54 PM:
| I don't like these, so I want to turn them off.  To do so, I added
| settings for them to my LS_COLORS environment variable, e.g.
|
| export
|
LS_COLORS='no=00:fi=00:di=00;34:ln=00;35:so=00;00:do=00;00:bd=00;00:cd=00;00:or=00;31:su=00;00:sg=00;00:tw=00;34:ow=00;34:st=00;34:pi=00;00:ex=00;32:'

Why aren't you using dircolors for this?  It makes it easier to maintain
the input that feeds the LS_COLORS definition.

| 1) ls only uses the colors specified in LS_COLORS (i.e., if I don't set
| any value for tw, it should appear normal, not colored)

This decision was made a couple of years ago for 5.90; directories with
poor permissions are enough of a security hole that it was decided that
changing the default color for those categories was worth the change to
alert users to that fact.

| 2) ls skips labels it doesn't understand, so I can specify labels like
| "tw" for newer versions of ls and have older versions ignore it

Too late there - the cat's out of the bag, and we aren't re-releasing
older versions to ignore unknown specifiers.  At best, we could change the
future 6.11 (or whatever number) to ignore unknown types, but that won't
help until 6.12 (or whatever other number) adds new types.  But it won't
help the current 6.10.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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