SCO UNIX (3.2.2) 'ls' is broken... what a shame
Riccardo Pizzi
pizzi at esacs.UUCP
Thu Jan 3 02:17:38 AEST 1991
We installed recently the new SCO UNIX release, i.e. 3.2.2.
I read a *lot* of people on the net saying that this new release is
stable and is not buggy like 3.2.0 and 3.2.1.
However, my first login on the newly installed system showed a very nasty
bug in one of the most used commands, 'ls'.
I wonder how it is possible that such a bug was not caught on the OS test
phase, and therefore I think maybe it only shows under particular
circumstances.
Please, look at the output of the 'lc' command on my home directory:
AAA house.c mbox remind22.5 sps.2
active.uunet hv at uwasa.fi mte215.zip.1 s.c sps.3
alt.groups hv at uwasa.fi.h mte215.zip.2 sb.1 sucker
anonftp.sites i2u.info.h nws sb.2 TTT
batchout.c i2u.info.i periodic sb.3 T1500.uunet
casa maild prog sb.5 uunet.games
ciuccia maild.c remind22.1 sb.6 uunet.unix
conq4 Makefila remind22.2 sb.7 uunet.x
ftp-server.h makefile remind22.3 sig
gifhelp Makefile remind22.4 sps.1
In the ASCII character set, I have always thought the capital (upper case)
letters should come *before* the lower case letters, but this seems not true
for SCO...
If we look at the following files: maild.c, Makefile, makefile e Makefila,
we would expect to see the following:
Makefila
Makefile
maild.c
makefile
now, take a look and see how SCO sorted the files...
The first problem that comes to my mind is that the old habit of giving
important files an uppercase name (or capitalized, as you prefer) does not
work here... what a shame!
I thought the bug could depend on the internationalization stuff, but never
had the time to dig into it to debug the problem (I don't like SCO UNIX
at all, agreeing with most developers out there so I don't want to do it, too).
BTW: today I found that the numbers always come *after* all other letters:
total 106
drwxr-xr-x 2 bin bin 32 Nov 19 13:22 backupfirst
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Dec 31 23:50 croutPCHa00232
drwxrwxr-x 2 400 other 32 Dec 12 14:44 dd
-rw------- 1 pizzi mmdf 12288 Jan 02 16:16 Ex23616
-rw------- 1 nick group 6144 Jan 02 16:16 Ex23751
drwxr-xr-x 20 bin bin 320 Nov 19 13:22 ID
drwx------ 3 sys sys 48 Oct 24 18:22 init2
-rw-r--r-- 1 pizzi mmdf 112 Jan 02 15:48 posta23609
-rw------- 1 pizzi mmdf 11264 Jan 02 16:16 Rx23616
-rw------- 1 nick group 10240 Jan 02 16:16 Rx23751
-rw-r--r-- 1 nick group 551 Jan 02 16:06 sh237284
-rw-r--r-- 1 nick group 162 Jan 02 16:06 sh237285
-rw-r--r-- 1 nick group 184 Jan 02 16:06 sh237286
-rw-r--r-- 1 pizzi mmdf 2895 Jan 02 16:04 uffa
-rw-r--r-- 1 pizzi mmdf 5 Jan 02 16:16 1st_time
Anybody has a solution?
Riccardo
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