From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7 Description of problem: The column widths in "ls -l" have begun to resize dynamically in the last coreutils. With coreutils-5.0-24: $ ls -l / | head -2 total 192 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 19 18:09 bin $ ls -l /etc | head -2 total 2972 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15228 Oct 17 12:18 a2ps.cfg With coreutils-5.0-34.1: $ ls -l / | head -2 total 209 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 14 20:44 bin $ls -l /etc | head -2 total 2740 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15228 Oct 17 12:18 a2ps.cfg All cramped up, and column width changing depending on what's in the directory. That's the first time I've ever seen an 'ls' do that, and 'ls' is a place I'd expect inter-Unix similarity to be good. (I also find it a lot harder to read.) I can't tell if this was intentional or not. I hope it wasn't. :-) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): coreutils-5.0-34.1 How reproducible: Always
From the spec-file: ---------- * Wed Mar 3 2004 Tim Waugh <twaugh> 5.0-34.1 - Build for Fedora Core 1. * Thu Dec 4 2003 Tim Waugh <twaugh> 5.0-34.sel - Fix column widths problems in ls. ---------- I get the same output here with coreutils-5.0-34.1. I think that the output is quite acceptable. I think it's a good idea to change the width of the columns depending on the width of the values in the columns. OK, there may be some discussion on the output of "ls -l / /etc".
Intentional.