On 05/22/2014 09:44 AM, Stefan Vargyas wrote: > > Dear maintainers, > > Since coreutils v8.9 I was using a customized 'stat', which has the additional > features implied by the command line options and by the format sequence shown > below:
Thanks for the patch. It's cleanly implemented in a table driven manner. However there are a few conceptual issues ... > > $ stat --help > Usage: stat [OPTION]... [FILE]... > or: stat [OPTION]... --files-from=F > Display file or file system status. > ... > --digest-type=WORD > when computing file content sums use specified > message digest algorithm: md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, > sha384 or sha512; when the option is not specified > compute sha1 digests So you provide the above to essentially munge the checksum into the line for easy comparision with diff etc. While this is a valid and useful technique, wouldn't it be better to leverage the existing utilities to join the data like: join -j2 <(stat -c '%s %n' /bin/ls /bin/cp | sort) <(sha1sum /bin/cp /bin/ls | sort) Also diff might not be that general in the presence of many different files, so you might also find this construct useful: tr '\n' '\1' | sort | uniq -u ... > ... > --files-from=F display status of files specified by names in file > F; > If F is - then read names from standard input There is no advantage of supporting this option in stat as that is only useful when a command needs to process all file names in a _single invocation_, like when sorting or accumulating etc. For stat one can efficiently: find ... -print 0 | xargs -r0 stat ... or find ... -exec stat {} + Note also that sort has the --zero-terminated option, as do newer versions of join and uniq. > --quoting-style=WORD > use quoting style WORD for file names: > literal, locale, shell, shell-always, c, escape > c-maybe, clocale; > when no option is given, use literal style This could be useful, however there is already the %N option for quoted file name. $ stat -c %N /bin/ls ‘/bin/ls’ $ LANG=C src/stat -c %N /bin/ls '/bin/ls' Can you detail the exact use case for this. If we were to apply this bit I guess it would make sense to only apply the selection to %N ? thanks! Pádraig.