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Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 09:10:47 +0100
From: David Malone <dwmalone@maths.tcd.ie>
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cc: Dimitry Andric <dimitry@andric.com>
cc: Scott Mitchell <scott+freebsd@fishballoon.org>
Subject: Re: /bin/ls sorting bug? 
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> Sorting on nanoseconds too is likely to be more confusing than
> useful.  Even if we use one of the precious few option letters ls
> doesn't use already to add a nanosecond display, most people won't
> know about it because they don't care about nanoseconds.  They
> might care when they notice---as you did---that the sort order
> isn't what they expected.

At the moment in FreeBSD the nanoseconds field is always zero,
unless you twiddle vfs.timestamp_precision, so it would make no
difference to joe user. For people that do set vfs.timestamp_precision,
it would be nice if ls did the right thing (for example, test already
compares the nanoseconds field, after someone submitted a PR because
it didn't).

> Is the point of sorting on nanoseconds to totally order the files
> based on modification time?

Depending on the clock resolution (which is partially determined
by vfs.timestamp_precision and partially determined by the actual
clock resolution), it may not be enough to totally order the files.

	David.