[Edbrowse-dev] file attributes on directory scan.

[Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net>]

Ok, lsl lists the length of the file on the current line
in directory mode, but ls=l fetches the length of every file
in subsequent directory scans.
See the documentation for more details.
Browsed usersguide line 1072.

As mentioned earlier, I had to muck with the code in many places.
reading or writing a file, a directory, what was a directory into a file,
or into another session, or reading another session into this one,
maybe it was a directory listing maybe not,
and so on.
After a day or so of work I thought I had it all working,
I made one tiny change to buffers.c, and wrote the file, and file write failed.
I had broken something, badly!
buffers.c was now 13 bytes long, and all my work was lost.
It's amazing how we rely on this program,
and how frightening when it doesn't work.
So I had lost all that effort, or had I?
All the new software was still in the buffer, I just couldn't write it anywhere.
But I could print it, and I have a linear adapter.
My linear "screen" is smaller than buffers.c, so I printed the first 2000 lines,
then saved the screen to a temp file,
then the next 2000, and so on,
and then I put the files together and reproduced buffers.c.
Holy crap!
Course printing turned tabs into spaces, so I had to run it through indent again.
My file was back!
Always best if you don't panic.
Finally I used ed to find and fix the writing bug,
wrote bufffers.c, recompiled, tested, and it seems to work again.
But wow!

Always keep backups of your work or important files,
even just a few hours work, copy the file to /tmp or something just to be safe.

Anyways, try setting
ls=st
or some such and edit a directory.
Honestly I probably won't use this full scan feature very often,
too much clutter for me,
but sometimes I just want to know the size or time of one of the files in my listing,
and I can use lss or lst for that, and that meets my needs.

Karl Dahlke