Re: [coreutils] Re: [PATCH 2/2] stat: print timestamps to full resolution

[Eric Blake]

On 10/21/2010 08:42 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> > 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.

Not quite:

$ stat -c%0.20X .
00000000001287615247

> 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.

I'm still wary of special-casing precision like this; should it behave 
more like printf()s %.d or %.f?  What you are arguing for is that %X has 
no . or subsecond digits, %.X has nine subsecond digits, but what about 
%.*X?  At this point, I'm thinking that %:X is nicer than %.X, to avoid 
these types of confusion, and given that date(1) already supports %:z.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org