On 21/10/10 15:18, Pádraig Brady wrote: > On 21/10/10 15:01, Jim Meyering wrote: >> Andreas Schwab wrote: >>> Jim Meyering <j...@meyering.net> writes: >>> >>>> And besides, with coreutils-8.6 already released, reverting the >>>> change is no longer an option. >>> >>> Why? I'm pretty sure more breakage will pop up over time. >> >> Hmm... I see what you mean. >> Anyone using a distribution with coreutils-8.5 or older will >> think it's fine to treat $(stat -c %X) as an integer with no >> decimal or trailing fraction. >> >> Is it worthwhile to create a new format, say %...:X (and same for Y and Z) >> that expands to seconds.nanoseconds and to revert %...X to the old >> seconds-only semantics? >> >> That would make it so people could use stat's %X %Y %Z portably >> while new scripts can still get nanosecond accuracy when needed. >> >> Here's PoC code: >> >> $ for i in %X %:X %Y %:Y %Z %:Z; do src/stat -c $i .; done >> 1256665918 >> 1256665918.441784225 > > Or use '.' rather than ':' which also has the > advantage of being backward compat with older stats,
To clarify, coreutils <= 8.5 output these timestamps using an int format internally, and so ignored any specified precision. coreutils 8.6 treats these timestamps as strings and therefore %.X will not output anything which is a pity, but if we're considering making 8.6 "special" in it's handling of %[WXYZ], then perhaps this is OK. cheers, Pádraig.
