[CLUE-Tech] Command line order

[Kevin Cullis]

Lynn Danielson wrote:
> 
> Kevin Cullis wrote:
> > "Jeffery C. Cann" wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 05 December 2000 10:08, Kevin Cullis wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I did the ls -fl AND an ls -lf and got two different displays.
> > >
> > > In general, the order does not matter.  I tried cat -vet file and cat -tev
> > > file and observed the same results.
> >
> > Then did you try my stuff and see what happens?  I'm now curious as to
> > why this might be happening.  Could it be BASH that might cause this?
> 
> Kevin, Grant already gave you the answer to this question.  The -l and -f
> switches are incompatible.  You get the results of one or the other, they
> do not work together.  The man page

Aha!  Then the new version of Linux in a Nutshell (3rd Ed.) does not say
that, that's what I was refering to first and, yes, the man page does
say -l and -f are "incompatible."  Damn documentation/books ;-)  At
least the software works!! ;-)

> 
> As to why you get different results depending on the switch ordering.  I
> can only guess from actually looking at the results.  The way GNU ls seems
> to work is -- if there is a conflict between switches the last one wins.
> Therefore, if "ls -lf" is equivalent to "ls -f" and "ls -fl" is equivalent
> to "ls -l".  This is not clearly documented in the man or info pages, but
> it's clearly the way it works (at least in this case).  The "ls" command is
> not a built-in shell command, so bash has nothing to do with its operation.
> 
> On Solaris, the "-f" switch always disables the "-l" switch (among others)
> regardless of the order.  This method of operation may make more sense to
> you.  But as we all know, GNU's not UNIX.

No problem, I was just trying to understand the concept as to why it may
not have worked since the documentation failed to indicate this.

Thanks Lynn.

Kevin