Re: ls -d link/

[Markus Werle]

Bob Proulx wrote:

> Standards are a good thing even if you don't agree with them.

Yes, I know. I am a C++ programmer who still waits for a
standard conformant compiler :-).

But even if standards are a good thing it should be allowed
to say that sometimes the decision is just a decision.
Voted by the committee. Such a decision is not automatically good

Every time I stumble over an illogical feature in
a software package, I do not care whether it is standard
or not. If it may tackle the unaware, if it is improvable,
I am the one to say so.

I am pretty sure that my post here has exactly no effect
on the behaviour of binutils, because it is better to
cling to a bad standard than not to have one.
But maybe some standard commitee member listens ...


> > > which says to resolve the symlink to destination first.
> >
> > Oh! really?
> > So why ain't the destination showed by its name in the output?
>
> It was showed by the name you used to list it.

Oh come on!

> If you had wanted to
> list it by the name /home/markus you would have needed to list that.

I disagree. Then even in the case without the "/"
The link should be shown and not "demo -> /home/markus"
Again: that the "/" makes a difference is so unintuitive
I will not be the last one to get trapped by this.

It is a matter of software ergonomy.

> In UNIX a file may have many names.  All are valid.  A file may be
> hard linked or soft linked.  Since soft links were designed to operate
> similar to soft links the behavior is also similar.

But that is not the point. I still believe a better output would be:
# ll -d demo/
drwxr-xr-x   45 markus   users        4153 Mar 12 12:00 demo/ -> /home/markus

> > Thinking that "demo/" is something completely different is
> > a _decision_ taken by special people who live in a special world: UNIX.
>
> Perhaps you will find kindred souls here.  :-)

I guess not.
I am for linux since version 0.98p17 or so.

Markus