Re: --format flag

[Bruce Korb]

Jim Meyering wrote:

> > I do not believe it would be a significant amount of work:
> 
> If you can do it with an insignificant amount of work, that'd be great.
> Have you just volunteered?  ;-)

My first roofing contractor was discovered to have cut through
the earthquake straps holding the two halves of my house
together + I'm up against a release deadline.  Maybe in a few
weeks ...  "not significant" ! -> "insignificant".  "moderate"
would be a good term, and most of that would be getting familiar
with the code.

> >  http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/snprintfv (whenever that
> > goes back online again).  Personally, I'd choose to avoid
> > one letter cryptic entries and opt for:
> >
> >   ls --format="%w.n{mod} $w{inode} ${userid} ${username} ..."
> 
> I like the verbose names.
> Are there really three different types of syntax: %w, $w{} and ${}?

No.  Snprintfv handles the width min/max fields of normal:  %5.5s things.
The registered format character would be '{' and the handler routine
uses up to the '}' character and tells the engine to resume from there.

So, what do you think about adding POSIX library/sys calls as
a collection of command line utilities?  We already have "stat",
but don't have "getpwnam".  There are a few others.....

Cheers - Bruce