Re: qshell, ls, sort by size

[Hans Boldt <hans@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott Klement wrote:
> Shrug... I wouldn't mind them adding the -S as an extension, but I'm 
> pretty sure they won't, since it would break any existing scripts that 
> rely on the current behavior of -S.  IBM has always been committed to 
> preserving backward compatibility (as you know.)
>
> My point is that -S isn't "standard."   It's a popular (and, arguably 
> useful) extension to -S.  But it's not a standard, and therefore not a 
> bug.  A poor design decision?  Absolutely, I'll accept that.  But I 
> can't see IBM considering it a bug.

Agreed. As I said before (or perhaps just strongly implied), IBM can't
fix ls in qshell.

> I know a lot of Unix programmers, indeed, I'm one myself.  Perhaps 
> 15-20% of the work I do is on FreeBSD.  The best programmers, the 
> experienced ones who are the best paid of the lot, are the ones who have 
> learned how to write portable code.
>
> Every Unix system is a little different from others.  Unix programmers 
> get good at writing code that's easy to port to other systems.  They 
> take pride in it.

And I too am a Unix programmer. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, plus assorted flavors
of Linux. (Actually, the server product I work on currently runs  on
OpenBSD, Debian, and Windows.) I used Unix for the first time in school
in the late 1980's. In fact, I still have a copy of "The Bell System
Technical Journal", July/August 1978 edition.

But to get back to my original point, Posix compatibility is well and
good, and various commercial Unixes were certainly certified. But
really, how much of an effort did the commercial vendors put into
interoperability? (Don't forget what Posix certification meant for
Windows NT: Diddly-squat!)

It wasn't until GNU/Linux started eating into the Unix market that the
commercial Unix vendors started getting serious about compatibility. And
so, around about 2000, they started adding Linux compatibility (or
affinity) to their Unix products. That is, the de-facto standard (GNU)
is what brought greater compatibility, not the official Posix standard!

In the Linux world, only one particular obscure distribution ever
bothered to go through the trouble and expense of Posix certification.
For all the others, does anyone really care anymore about Posix?

Cheers! Hans