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From: cdl@mplvax.ARPA (Carl Lowenstein)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: /bin/ls -C Question
Message-ID: <261@mplvax.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 20-Feb-86 10:19:27 EST
Article-I.D.: mplvax.261
Posted: Thu Feb 20 10:19:27 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Feb-86 07:36:15 EST
References: <337@chinet.UUCP>
Reply-To: cdl@mplvax.UUCP (Carl Lowenstein)
Organization: Marine Physical Laboratory, UCSD
Lines: 16
Keywords: ls

In article <337@chinet.UUCP> megabyte@chinet.UUCP (Mark E. Sunderlin) writes:
>Ok, here is my question to the net.  Why does ls -C Sometimes
>NOT print across the screen?  
>But some times a directory will list one per line on me.  What does
>ls make this decision on?  I have seen this behavior on both at&t 3b2
>machines and on Tandy 6000 machines. (sys V on one Xenix 3 on the latter)

This seems to be the now-famous SysV 14-character filename bug.  Directories
have exactly 14 bytes allocated for the file name, so a full-length name
can't have a null terminator.  When ls(1) tries to compute the number
of columns to use for the -C option it gets some ridiculously long length
for one of the file names, and gives up and uses a single column.

-- 
	carl lowenstein		marine physical lab	u.c. san diego
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