Re: [9fans] Fork: useless and painful?

[Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>]

Your point is taken.  I wouldn't object as much to an option to ls
(though ls already has too many options) to print times in the ugly
all-numeric format or just as seconds since the epoch, but to change
the default output format at this late date to the ugly format, with
no obvious way to disable it (I can't see how in a quick reading of
Linux's ls(1)), seems wrong.

To really pick nits, why should setting LANG=en_US.UTF-8 bugger the
sort order and change to all-numeric uglies?  I'm an English-speaker
in the US who prefers UTF-8, and I don't want any of this rubbish.
Actually the all-numeric uglies I sort of understand; I'd never seen
such aversion to four-digit years and month names, despite the
ambiguity of all-numeric dates internationally, until I moved to the
US.  But if I wanted my ls output in `sort -df' order, I'd pipe it
through `sort -df +8'.  These changes are just somebody's favourite
dumb ideas glommed onto a convenient locale.