Doug McIlroy wrote in <202003130304.02D343ok099975(a)tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>DU>: |> -,: Make the option standard: output numbers with commas every 3 digits | |A terrible idea. Whatever ls outputs should be easy for other |programs to read, and few know how to read commafied numbers. |As others have mentioned, this is also a strong argument for |changing the output representation of dates. | |I often do mailx -H | sort -t/ -k2nr to sort in reverse order of size--a |quick way to find the pay dirt when I want to shrink my mailbox. |This would never fly if the sizes had commas. (Well, I suppose I |could add sed s/,//g to the pipeline.) It was not fully developed code why you need to do this with the old mailx you use. With v14.9.11 that is in Debian stable (it is called s-nail there) and Ubuntu since "Disco Dingo" (i do not know Ubuntu, but i seem to recall you said you were using it) that becomes mailx -Sautosort=date -H [| tac] for example. But you could also use -L and do something like mailx -H -L '(larger 5000)' # > 5000 bytes mailx -H -L '(before 1-Mar-2020)' mailx -H -L '(since 1-Mar-2020)' or even go a batch approach (`search' == `from'): printf 'search "(before 1-Mar-2020)" # sh(1)ell quoting needed! move ` +elder # move the last selection to $folder/elder xit ' | mailx -Squiet -Snoheader This can be improved further (-# batch mode, for example). A lot of things are missing yet, however, these examples use IMAP search expression syntax, a compile-time option. No "regular" approach to these things yet. Anyway, that mailx is 4670 changesets ahead of what you use. It is unfortunately not the place, date and time to grouch about the Debian punishment of small projects with fewest developers, the latest release is 5554 ahead (and enters unstable; in testing there is one that is 5204 changesets ahead). These are _my_ changesets: with a Dr. Hipp Fossil versioning philosophie the numbers could easily be doubled or tripled. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

That is not an easy thing to do because of local (er, locale:) conventions. See https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/index.html for examples. Having a canonical input and output format, which is converted by filters just before/after the human sees the numbers, seems the only way to make this work globally.