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May 30, 2023 at 12:53 comment added Stéphane Chazelas @finefoot, See also What does "LC_ALL=C" do?. wc -c only works for non-directory files you have permission to read and have possible side effects for non-regular files. See also How can I get the size of a file in a bash script?
May 30, 2023 at 12:27 comment added finefoot Ahh, great. That's explains it, thank you. :) I've seen LC_ALL=C quite a few times in scripts and always wanted to read about the reason why it's used. And you opted for ls compared to wc -c (see below) due to much better performance of reading the size instead of counting the length, right?
May 30, 2023 at 5:06 comment added Stéphane Chazelas @finefoot, the date field is locale-dependant as well as what blank characters may be used to separate fields (though in practice, that date field appears after the field we're interested in so unless it contains newline characters, it's likely not going to be a problem, and I've not seen any ls implementation that uses blank characters other than space to separate fields). C locale in any case removes complex processing in both printing and parsing and reduces the risk of bad surprise.
May 29, 2023 at 23:34 comment added finefoot Your answers are always very helpful and a great source to learn from. I am still trying to understand each line. "The output of ls -n is only specified in the C/POSIX locale." Where are you getting this information from? I had a look at the opengroup utilities/ls page
May 29, 2023 at 22:55 vote accept finefoot
Dec 21, 2022 at 9:27 history edited Stéphane Chazelas CC BY-SA 4.0
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Dec 21, 2022 at 9:19 history edited Stéphane Chazelas CC BY-SA 4.0
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Dec 21, 2022 at 9:14 history edited Stéphane Chazelas CC BY-SA 4.0
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Dec 21, 2022 at 8:56 history answered Stéphane Chazelas CC BY-SA 4.0