"Jordan Russell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I'm no expert either, but I certainly don't believe that format string is > intended to be used literally.
It's intended to be read literally, _except_ that spaces in the format string stand for one or more blanks in the output. There's a special character in the POSIX spec (which looks like a triangle) that's intended to stand for a single literal space in the format. Here's a URL describing this stuff in detail: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/basedefs/xbd_chap05.html#tag_05 Incidently, the trailing space in typical "ls" modes that Jim mentioned is part of what I think is a minor bug in the POSIX spec. POSIX currently requires a blank after that trailing space, but Solaris "ls" doesn't always have two spaces there. I suspect this is a bug in the POSIX spec, not a bug in Solaris "ls", but I haven't gotten around to filing a bug report, and in the meantime GNU "ls" always outputs two spaces. Assuming that the POSIX spec is buggy, GNU "ls" can be changed to omit the extra space when it isn't needed. For example, instead of this: $ ls -ld /tmp drwxrwxrwt 13 root root 8192 2004-04-11 01:48 /tmp GNU "ls" could output this: $ ls -ld /tmp drwxrwxrwt 13 root root 8192 2004-04-11 01:48 /tmp _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
