On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 01:43:01PM -0400, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> 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.

Sounds interesting.

> 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.

Definitely.

> 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!

Points for much creativitiy here...

> 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.

Definitely, and save often when working (I always forget that one).

> 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.

Will have to play with this.

Cheers,
Adam.