ls: Compatibility Tracking Issue

[tertsdiepraam]

I've made an overview of all options that need to be added and defaults that need to be changed in ls to reach full compatibility with GNU ls. I hope this might help people out who want to contribute, without adding to many issues to the issue list.

The items marked with :one: are the ones I think make Good First Issues.

• [x] Formats
  • [x] -x & --format=across & --format=horizontal
  • [x] -m & --format=commas
  • [x] Make -n overrideable (similar to -o and -g)
• [ ] Date & time
  • [x] --time=birth & --time=creation
  • [x] --time-style=full-iso
  • [x] --time-style=long-iso
  • [x] --time-style=iso
  • [ ] --time-style=locale (works, but not locale-specific yet)
  • [ ] --time-style=+FORMAT like in date
  • [ ] posix- prefix for --time-style
  • [x] --full-time
  • [x] Default: follow environment variable TIME_STYLE or locale
• [ ] Escaping and quoting
  • [x] -b. --escape& --quoting-style=escape
  • [x] -Q, --quote-name & --quoting-style=c
  • [x] -N, --literal & --quoting-style=literal
  • [x] --quoting-style=shell & --quoting-style=shell-always
  • [x] --quoting-style=shell-escape & --quoting-style=shell-escape-always
  • [ ] --quoting-style=locale
  • [ ] --quoting-style=clocale
  • [x] Default: follow environment variable QUOTING_STYLE or shell-escape.
  • [x] Space in front of file names without quotes if there are names with quotes.
• [x] Control characters
  • [x] -q & --hide-control-characters
  • [x] --show-control-characters
  • [x] Set default to -q if the output is a terminal.
• [ ] Sorting
  • [x] -U & --sort=none
  • [x] -v & --sort=version (also used in sort, so might make sense to put this in uucore)
  • [x] -X & --sort=extension
  • [ ] Make sorting by name locale-specific (currently only C-locale is implemented). Among other problems, this causes a behaviour where hidden files (prefixed with ".") are sorted before other files, instead of the leading "." being ignored.
  • [x] :one: --group-directories-first
  • [ ] -f (enable -aU, disable -ls --color)
• [x] Dereferencing
  • [x] -H & --dereference-command-line
  • [x] --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir
• [x] Hiding
  • [x] --hide
  • [x] -I & --ignore
• [x] Indicator style
  • [x] --indicator-style with options: none, slash, file-type, classify
  • [x] -p (equivalent to --indicator-style=slash)
  • [x] --file-type (equivalent to --indicator-style=file-type)
• [ ] Block size (these should mainly be implemented in uucore, since they are used by multiple programs)
  • [ ] -s & --size
  • [ ] -k & --kibibytes (equivalent to --block-size=1K)
  • [x] --block-size
  • [x] Default: Determine block size from environment variables.
• [ ] Loose ends: The options that didn't fit into the categories above
  • [x] -w & --width
  • [ ] -T & --tabsize
  • [ ] -Z & --context
  • [ ] -D & --dired
  • [x] --hyperlink
  • [x] Show total size of directories in the long format

[sylvestre]

Bravo for this work!

Don't hesitate to create new issues as "good first bugs"!

[LevitatingBusinessMan]

@tertsdiepraam That's another few points to tick off

[tertsdiepraam]

@LevitatingBusinessMan Thanks for reminding me!

[LevitatingBusinessMan]

@tertsdiepraam Don't forget the posix time-styles. And the TIME_STYLE environemntal variable works already.

[siebenHeaven]

Nice list :) - I was implementing 'total size' related feature which I noticed to be missing from output. I think it aligns with the last item in the list?

[tertsdiepraam]

Yes, that's what that was supposed to be! I rewrote it a bit to make it clearer (hopefully). Looking forward to the PR!

[siebenHeaven]

Thanks for confirming - it was already clear as is, I just was double confirming.

[LevitatingBusinessMan]

@sylvestre did you close this by mistake?

[sylvestre]

nah, it was closed when the PR has been merged!

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[LevitatingBusinessMan]

Set default to -q if the output is a terminal.

The IsTerminal trait was stabilized in 1.70.0 recently. So this feature should be trivial to implement once we move the minimum rust version up.

[tertsdiepraam]

Indeed! We're also using the is_terminal crate in other utils, which has the same interface, I think. So this should be pretty easy to do.

[LevitatingBusinessMan]

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/src/uu/ls/src/ls.rs#L830-L837

Judging by this code, this is already done. Though I am not sure if it is correctly tested.

[tertsdiepraam]

We probably can't really test it. I'll mark it as done in the list. Thanks!

[keys-i]

was this one completed?

[sylvestre]

nope, we still have some options not passing compared to GNU