Showing actual filesizes with ls

[Joakim Rosqvist (JRO.SE)]

It seems the only way to display the actual filesize (as opposed
to disk usage) with ls is to use the long listing format (-l), but then 
the output will show only one file per line. 

I would like to see a new option to ls that works like --size (showing
filenames and sizes in as many columns as will fit onscreen), but shows
filesize instead of disk usage.  There is already a similar option
recently added to "du", --apparent-size, so for the sake of consistency
that might be a good name.

I volounteer to write the patch (in fact, I've already submitted it here,
but got no feedback), so I'm asking for comments, e.g. what would be the
best size to show for a symlink: the size of the link or the size of the 
file referred to?  What would be the best default blocksize (currently,
I'm using file_output_block_size which is 1).