Re: [PATCH] honor TIME_STYLE environment variable for formatting ls timestamp

On 11/15/25 17:33, James Youngman wrote:
> I think if someone requires a specific output format, then they should
> specify the format they want with (for example) -printtf.

excellent point - how could I have forgotten about -printf?
> If the capabilities of -printf are insufficient to reproduce the
> effect of, say, -ls, then we should improve it[*].   This general
> problem is why the -printf documentation says:
> 
>                %{ %[ %(
>                       Reserved for future use.
> 
> See commit 9cb1805e619b0f3aebd0984856de24964218bce2 of 2011-06-2011.
> 
> If we're going to use one or more of these reserved sequences, I would
> like one of them to be for user-specified extensions (since that's the
> kind of use I had in mind when I reserved them).

yes, one of the nice things about the --time-style option in ls(1) and
du(1) are the predefined styles like "full-iso".
Those could eventually be achieved with "%{ %[ %(", but the problem
is that the time-style tells how to format, but now which of the
timestamps: atime, btime, ctime, mtime.
Maybe something like %{mtime:full-iso} but this also doesn't look ideal.
There's many possibilities, even e.g. -ls-full-iso or alike.
FWIW: there was a -lsh suggestion to print as in 'ls -dilsh' in human
readable format a while ago.

Anyway, I think with the above argument about the existing functionality
in -printf, which would be redundant to the current time-style suggestion,
we can close the issue, right?
   https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?66299

Have a nice day,
Berny