[oe] xterm: either fix it, or remove it. please.

[Frans Meulenbroeks]

2009/11/12 Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>:

> the above is switching on a symbolic mode, and that final line is
> using sed to convert the symbolic mode to the corresponding numeric
> mode for installation.
>
>  that worked fine a few years back, but it fails on newer linux
> distros for which the long listing might have a trailing period, as
> does my fedora 11 system:
>
> $ ls -l /etc/passwd
> -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 2474 2009-11-09 14:59 /etc/passwd
>          ^ there

Hm. I've never ever heard about this trailing period. Where does it
come from/how was it introduced?

IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition does not specify the trailing dot
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/utilities/ls.html )

My OpenSuse 11.2 system also gives no period and as far as I know
neither busybox nor the gnu coreutlis ls gives this period.

Personally I'm inclined to say that fedora's ls is broken.
Adding a dot after the mode bits seems meaningless for me and will
break more than one shell script.

But of course anyone feel free to enlighten me where this dot comes
from or what the use of it is.

@Robert: do you have any info where your fedora ls comes from? Is this
a shell builtin (and if so which shell), is it a busybox ls, a gnu
coreutils ls, something else?
what does
which ls
say ?

(btw sometimes /bin/ls and /usr/bin/ls and ls produce different results).

(and yeah trivial patches mailed to the list seem to be applied fairly
quickly, if more work is involved the chance decreases that someone
picks it up, especially when things seemingly work for them).

Frans