Why LS_OPTIONS and --group-directories-first?

English Applications
1

I did see this thread Tcsh ls now sorts like Windows by default but it’s closed.

Anyone know why this has been changed to sort like that? I can’t find anything rational behind it. Anyone know anything more?

I’m guessing quite a few scripts will break. I have about +20 that broke. Sure, I solve it with ~/.bashrc but it seems a bit strange to change something that has worked since Epoch.

Another strange thing. Why didn’t all the shells get this treatment?

$ grep LS_OPTIONS /usr/etc/profile.d/ls.* | grep group
/usr/etc/profile.d/ls.bash:        LS_OPTIONS="-A -N $LS_OPTIONS -T 0 --group-directories-first"
/usr/etc/profile.d/ls.bash:        LS_OPTIONS="-N $LS_OPTIONS -T 0 --group-directories-first"
/usr/etc/profile.d/ls.tcsh:    setenv LS_OPTIONS "-A -N $LS_OPTIONS -T 0 --group-directories-first"
/usr/etc/profile.d/ls.tcsh:    setenv LS_OPTIONS "-N $LS_OPTIONS -T 0 --group-directories-first"
$ ls -1 /usr/etc/profile.d/ls.*
/usr/etc/profile.d/ls.bash
/usr/etc/profile.d/ls.tcsh
/usr/etc/profile.d/ls.zsh
2

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1254474

3

I am curious how this caused scripts to break.

4

What one can do is copy the ls.bash to /etc/profile.d and remove the --group-directories-first from the LS_OPTIONS lines.

1 Like
5

I was the one who reported it.

6

ls -lart | tail -1

7

Yes. But I solved it in .bashrc

$ grep LS_OPTIONS .bashrc
LS_OPTIONS=‘-N --color=tty -T 0’

2 Likes
8

Thing is that I actually want to know the rational behind having --group-directories-first as default.

9

I am not sure what answer you expect here and why you expect it here. It was submitted by one SUSE employee and merged by another SUSE employee. You need to ask SUSE what was the reason.

10

First I thought of asking the factory@o.o list, but that list is quite littered with “unnecessary” questions. So I thought I’d try starting from the bottom. If I can’t get an explanation here, I’ll continue and try to ask upstream in opensuse/suse.

I suspect that the change is more to be like dir on Windows. I also suspect that they are trying to be more Windows-friendly to make the transformation from that platform easier.

Then it might be good to spark a debate about a, in my opinion, quite unnecessary change.

11

So we, the user to user forums, are at the bottom :grinning:

12

Definitely :smiley: But it has nothing to do with individuals. But as a group among other information channels, I consider the forum to be more of a beginner’s forum.

13

Okay. Thought I’d report back here since I actually started here. First. @knurpht is right. I’ll do as he suggested. Second, I asked about this in the PR thread on github and got an answer I can live with, but would rather not have. So, all in all, it’s solved. I’ll adapt and move on.

14

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.