[TUHS] V7 ls -s option

Aharon Robbins arnold at skeeve.com
Sun May 25 23:08:02 AEST 2003


> From: Dennis Ritchie <dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com>
> To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
> Subject: [TUHS] (no subject)
> Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 00:10:30 -0400
>
>  > The V7 ls(1) man page says that the -s option, which prints total
>  >blocks, includes any indirect blocks.
>
>  >However, the V7 struct stat didn't have the st_blocks member in the
>  > struct stat, and the code in ls.c uses
>
>  > 	long
>  >	nblock(size)
>  >	long size;
>  >	{
>  >		return((size+511)>>9);
>  >	}
>
>  >So, is this just a case of the man page being mistaken?
>
> Yes, it looks like a manual bug. Retrieving
> the true number of indirect blocks isn't possible
> from the 7th edition stat.  I'm not sure when (or by
> whom) the st_blocks member was added.

Thanks for confirming this.  In fact, the V7 calculation is only
an approximation in another sense; a file with large holes could
generate too large a result.

System III doesn't have st_nblocks either.

>  > While I'm at it, the V7 ls -a option only adds . and .. to the
>  > list; apparently all other dot files were printed by default.
>  > When did ls change such that -a applied to all dot files?
>
> UCB or USL did this (I'm sure which first).
> Both tended to use more . files.
>
> 	Dennis

As already pointed out, earlier Research code only checked the
first character for being '.'; I later looked at the V6 ls.c.

The System III ls.c is essentially the V7 one, but with comments
added, and -l printing both owner and group, with -g and -o to
turn off group or owner from -l.  Also, support for FIFOs.

The nblock() calculation is considerably more complicated, and
would seem to actually get the number of indirect blocks. At
first glance, it looks though like a file with holes would
still confuse it.

Nothing like engaging in Software Archeology... :-)

Thanks,

Arnold



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