On 05/31/2012 05:57 AM, Philipp Hahn wrote:
Hello,
I find parsing the output of "ls -l" very suspect and fragile,
As do I.
since its output heaviely depends on the environment: SELinux, ACLs,
That only affects the 11th character, which we are stripping.
locale.
That affects the date string and other elements later on in the line, but not the mode string. This _particular_ use of 'ls -l' is portable, as POSIX guarantees a consistent interpretation of the first 11 bytes of each line (it's not until later in the line that you indeed run into fragile parsing aspects, even under POSIX rules).
Perhaps using /usr/bin/stat would be better, but I don't know how available /usr/bin/stat" is on non-Linux-platforms (on my Debian system it's in coreutils).
I agree that stat(1) would be safer, but it is less portable, and we want this validation script to run everywhere. -- Eric Blake eblake@redhat.com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org