Re: "ls" spacing between columns

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   -rw-------  1 root root 861286 Apr  9 15:10 maillog

   Personally, I find directory listings more difficult to read with
   those columns packed together so tightly. Would it be possible to
   make it two spaces instead (a la FreeBSD "ls")?

I'm no expert, but this would not be POSIX compliant (but it could be
done if POSIXLY_CORRECT isn't set for example), from IEE Std 1003.1
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/ls.html):

,----[ POSIX 1003.1, ls ]
| If the -l option is specified without -L, the following information
| shall be written:
| 
| "%s %u %s %s %u %s %s\n", <file mode>, <number of links>,
|     <owner name>, <group name>, <number of bytes in the file>,
|     <date and time>, <pathname>
`----

And to be a real nitpicker, there should be only one space between the
<file mode> and <number of links> filed from GNU ls if one should
follow POSIX stricly...


Mmm... Maybe there is even a smallish bug in POSIX, from the example
section (ls -laRF):

-rwxr--r--   1 hlj      prog         572 Jul  4 12:07 foo*

That doesn't corespond with the above rule for -l.  Should this be
reported to the OpenGroup?

Cheers.