Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!YALE.ARPA!ram-ashwin
From: ram-ashwin@YALE.ARPA (Ashwin Ram)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: A find-file Hack
Message-ID: <8810251636.AA10923@ELI.CS.YALE.EDU>
Date: 25 Oct 88 16:36:54 GMT
Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Reply-To: Ram-Ashwin@yale.arpa (Ashwin Ram)
Distribution: gnu
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
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> From: amdahl!daveemme@AMES.ARC.NASA.GOV  (Dave Emme)
> 
> Here's a little bit of code to be run as a "find-file-hook".  It runs the
> UNIX command "ls -l" on the filename being visited and places the result in
> the message line.  This gives you the file size, date last modified,
> file permissions, etc. automatically.

This is a nice idea.  However, using call-process to invoke /bin/ls is, I
think, overkill; it is too slow and not portable to non-Unix systems.

You can get the same information by calling the file-attributes function and
formatting the result appropriately.  On my machine this is a lot faster.
This would also be portable if file-attributes has been written to call the
appropriate system functions on different systems, which I assume it has.

-- Ashwin.

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