what's with that trailing "." for the mode from "ls -l"

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Bryn M. Reeves wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 07:45 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 07:23 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > > i once knew this, really.  what's the explanation of that recent
> > > > introduction of an extra period after the normal mode bits in the
> > > > output from "ls -l"?
> > >
> > > Let me google that for you:
> > >
> > > http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ls+dot+permissions
> >
> >   a followup question would be, is there an ls option that would
> > *prevent* that security setting character from being printed?  i
> > ask since i'm working with a software project (openembedded) that
> > specifically takes a mode setting in symbolic mode (from the
> > output of "ls -l"), and uses sed to translate it to numeric mode,
> > and the script to do that doesn't take into account that potential
> > trailing period and promptly converts, say, "-rwxr-xr-x." to the
> > string "755.", which then causes the subsequent call to install to
> > crash with a bad numeric mode argument.
>
> Not that I know of. The "What information is listed" node of the ls
> info pages describes the characters used to indicate alternate
> access methods when listing files with '-l' but does not mention a
> way to suppress this.

  that's ok, it was only an issue because of the incredibly hacky way
that a numeric mode was being reproduced from an existing file -- by
grabbing the current symbolic mode, then running it through sed to get
the numeric mode back.  yuck.

  as someone noted here earlier, using "stat" is way simpler.

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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