[kwlug-disc] MKS - really the "lc" command

Doug Moen doug at moens.org
Sat Jul 30 15:47:33 EDT 2022


Thanks for sharing your source code, John.
My version is a cross between traditional `lc` and `ls -CF`. Alphabetization is vertical, down the columns, rather than horizontal. Executable file names are suffixed with `*` and resolved symbolic links are suffixed with `@`. Column widths are computed dynamically based on the widest file name in each column.

I'm missing two features that would make my code "releasable".
 * No UTF-8 support, for computing the widths of file names when computing spacing. Unfortunately this computation requires tables which change every year when new emojis and emoji operators are added, and maybe an extra 10,000 lines of code, who knows.
* It's written in HyperC, which is an object oriented dialect of C that I invented after reading the 1981 Smalltalk issue of Byte magazine. It seemed like a good idea at the time. :-(

Doug.

On Sat, Jul 30, 2022, at 11:11 AM, John Sellens wrote:
> I can't function without "lc".
>
> So more than a few years ago, I took my copy of lc, and managed to
> get it added to the freebsd ports tree:
>     https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/misc/lc
> where it seems to still exist today.
>
> And you can get it yourself here:
>     https://www.generalconcepts.com/resources/software/
>
> There might possibly be some new situations or file types it doesn't
> know about, but I use it at least a hundred times a day.  There may
> be some official UW updates since my copy of course, but I don't
> think all the UW/MFCF developed software was ever made available.
>
> I don't need no silly colourized "ls" command - I've got "lc" ready.
>
> John
>
>
> On Sat, 2022/07/30 08:21:04AM -0400, Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:
> | Do you remember the `lc` command? Stands for "list catalog", like 
> `ls` except it separates directories from files. It was one of the 
> utilities written at the University of Waterloo for the Honeywell. MKS 
> Toolkit had a version. I wrote my own version for Unix back in the 
> 1990's and still use it.
>
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