Bug 4561

Summary:	'ls' no longer honors trailing slash for directory
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	greerga
Component:	fileutils	Assignee:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Status:	CLOSED NEXTRELEASE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	6.0
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-08-23 14:48:33 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description greerga 1999-08-17 06:09:52 UTC

1) ln -s /tmp foo
2) ls -l foo
3) ls -l foo/

RedHat 5.2 (fileutils 3.16) will list the directory while
RedHat 6.0 (fileutils 4.0) will list the symlink twice.
I submit that the behavior is annoying, tedious, and a fix
for a non-existant problem.  The relevant ChangeLog entry
reads:

Wed Feb 19 22:06:32 1997  Jim Meyering
<meyering.gov>

        * src/ls.c (main): Remove trailing slashes from
command line arguments.
        Otherwise, running `mkdir x; chmod 644 x; ls -d x/'
(note the trailing
        slash) makes ls fail with permission denied on at
least Linux 1.2.13
        and 2.0.14 systems.

A 2.0.36 kernel does indeed say permission denied but RedHat
6.0 does not use a 2.0.x kernel and it works just fine with
the 2.2.x kernels.  Having the symbolic link listed when an
explicit slash is written makes no sense.  A trivial fix
would be this:

--- ./ls.c	Tue Aug 17 02:06:11 1999
+++ ./ls.c~	Tue Aug 17 02:07:02 1999
@@ -733,6 +733,7 @@
     dir_defaulted = 0;
   for (; i < argc; i++)
     {
-      strip_trailing_slashes (argv[i]);
       gobble_file (argv[i], 1, "");
     }

-George Greer

Comment 1 Preston Brown 1999-08-23 14:48:59 UTC

fixed in fileutils-4.0-3, available in the next release.