Re: qshell, ls, sort by size

On Wed, 20 May 2009, Scott Klement wrote:

So it's your position that the fact that ls doesn't work the same as
Linux should be regarded as a bug and reported to IBM as such? Despite
that there's a really easy way to solve the problem that will work on i
and all Unix systems?

I won't speak for Hans, but let me give my own opinion (and you make a very valid point about Windows having dominant market share yet it shouldn't be considered the standard in every situation). In my opinion, users expect the -S option of ls to sort by size and that it doesn't on i is a bug. Not a bug in the technical sense that it isn't working as designed, but a bug in the sense that it doesn't work as the users expect. I think that within the set of *nix users this expectation is not unreasonable and is due to the prevalence of the GNU utils. While you can't universally apply the rule of "most common usage" I think this is a time when doing so would be sensible. Which is most useful: having a very unique behaviour of showing the CCSID or following what most systems do and sorting by size? Stated another way, are most users going to want to see the CCSID or to sort by size? I think due to the prevalence of GNU most users are going to want -S to sort by size and thus IBM should change it.

But hey, if I was completely consistent in applying all my logic then x5250 would have a File menu, wouldn't it? ;)

James Rich

if you want to understand why that is, there are many good books on
the design of operating systems. please pass them along to redmond
when you're done reading them :)
- Paul Davis on ardour-dev