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Re: Color-ls package




On Sat, 16 Mar 1996, Greg Hudson wrote:

> > For the purposes of interaction with other system components, there
> > is to my knowledge no distinction between the behavior of gnu ls and
> > colorized gnu ls.
> 
> Here's an example: when a system enabled color ls by default (through
> its configuration files in /etc), as Slackware does, then the simple
> command "ls /foo/bar" will stat() every file in /foo/bar.  If /foo/bar
> contains mountpoints to distributed filesystems, this can cause the
> file listing to take much longer than it would have otherwise.
> Slackware users at MIT commonly shoot themselves in the foot by doing
> "ls /afs", which runs off and tries to contact AFS fileservers on
> several different continents.  If they hadn't been using color ls by
> default, they would have gotten a simple listing of the servers.
> 
> 

Hmmm... I didn't know there was significant difference between the two. 
Why does color ls have to stat each file if ls does not. The color of a 
given file is determined by the filename alone, isn't it? Maybe color ls 
needs an overhaul, if it doesn't behave well. I still don't like the idea 
of two seperate ls commands on the system, though. A choice of which ls 
to install, sure, but to have both...

							Shawn



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