From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; T312461) Description of problem: If a file's size is 9 digits or longer (100MB or larger), the output of "ls -l" will format columns incorrectly. The "file size" column doesn't have large enough width preallocated. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fileutils-4.0x-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a file with size 100000000 bytes or larger. 2. Put it into a directory with other smaller files. 3. /bin/ls -l Actual Results: Look at the line for file "ccc". It's pushed one column to the right. -rw------- 1 dbarrett dbarrett 246977 Jun 1 15:18 aaa -r--r--r-- 1 dbarrett dbarrett 97621364 Nov 26 23:44 bbb -r--r--r-- 1 dbarrett dbarrett 124582824 Nov 27 16:52 ccc -rw-r--r-- 1 dbarrett dbarrett 227553 Apr 12 2001 ddd Expected Results: All columns should be correctly aligned. Additional info: $ rpm -qf /bin/ls fileutils-4.0x-3
"Fixing" this isn't possible without slowing down things a lot (ls would have to either stat every file in the directory twice - once to find the largest file to determine the correct alignment, then again to find the actual ls output or to stat all files and keep the results in memory). Especially with recursive directory listings, "fixing" this either way would be a bad idea.