Re: ls -help not accurate

2008-12-29 Thread Philip Rowlands

On Mon, 29 Dec 2008, John Bowling wrote:


ls -d
returns only '.'
Per your faq this is the designed in operation

ls --help
does not reflect that operation:

 -d, --directorylist directory entries instead of contents,
  and do not dereference symbolic links


"." is the directory entry (not the contents) of ".", which is the 
default argument to ls.



For that result it should read
 -d, --directorylists base directory entry only instead of
contents,


"ls -d" is not a useful command on its own, without any arguments. 
Changing the --help text as suggested would mis-describe the intended 
purpose of -d, which is detailed in the referenced FAQ.



There is no way to get directory entries  (plural or multiple levels)
with just -d
making that description of -d very inaccurate.


 From the FAQ:
"If you are trying to find files in the directory hierarchy then you 
should look into using the find command."


--help output is intended to be more of a quick reference; the coreutils 
manual contains a longer description of -d.



Cheers,
Phil


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Re: ls -help not accurate

2008-12-29 Thread Andreas Schwab
John Bowling  writes:

> There is no way to get directory entries  (plural or multiple levels)
> with just -d

$ ls -d . ..
.  ..

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, sch...@suse.de
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
PGP key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."


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ls -help not accurate

2008-12-29 Thread John Bowling
ls -d
returns only '.'
Per your faq this is the designed in operation

ls --help
does not reflect that operation:

  -d, --directorylist directory entries instead of contents,
   and do not dereference symbolic links

For that result it should read
  -d, --directorylists base directory entry only instead of
contents,

There is no way to get directory entries  (plural or multiple levels)
with just -d
making that description of -d very inaccurate.

Thanks, John


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