On 21/10/10 15:01, Jim Meyering wrote: > Andreas Schwab wrote: >> Jim Meyering <[email protected]> writes: >> >>> And besides, with coreutils-8.6 already released, reverting the >>> change is no longer an option. >> >> Why? I'm pretty sure more breakage will pop up over time. > > Hmm... I see what you mean. > Anyone using a distribution with coreutils-8.5 or older will > think it's fine to treat $(stat -c %X) as an integer with no > decimal or trailing fraction. > > Is it worthwhile to create a new format, say %...:X (and same for Y and Z) > that expands to seconds.nanoseconds and to revert %...X to the old > seconds-only semantics? > > That would make it so people could use stat's %X %Y %Z portably > while new scripts can still get nanosecond accuracy when needed. > > Here's PoC code: > > $ for i in %X %:X %Y %:Y %Z %:Z; do src/stat -c $i .; done > 1256665918 > 1256665918.441784225
Or use '.' rather than ':' which also has the advantage of being backward compat with older stats,
