[OS X TeX] mkdir and finder

[Justin Walker]

On Jan 15, 2005, at 10:17, David Arnold wrote:

> Thoger,
>
>
>> Sounds strange. Any dir made in my terminal is immediately visible in
>> the Finder.
>> Did you make it a hidden dir (.dirname)...?
>
> No, I didn't. Here's another example.
>
> David-Arnolds-Computer:~/Documents/NewBook davidarnold$ mkdir david
> David-Arnolds-Computer:~/Documents/NewBook davidarnold$ ls
[snip]
> But it is not visible in the Finder. However, here's another piece of 
> evidence I am worried about.

There seems to be some problem here, in that most of us see the 
directory immediately after creating it (modulo a 1-2 second delay).

[snip]
> drwxr-xr-x    2 davidarn  davidarn       68 15 Jan 10:14 david
>
> See the owner of the file? davidarn
>
> But,
>
> David-Arnolds-Computer:~/Documents/NewBook davidarnold$

This is, I think, a "legacy" issue.  Back when Unix was new, and there 
were still wolves in Wales, the "passwd" format implicitly limited 
login names to 8 characters.  Some Unix utilities still think that way. 
  I have not looked at the source for 'ls', but it wouldn't surprise me 
to find something like %8s in the print string.

I don't think this is the problem, but a relatively easy check is to 
create yourself a new account, with a name shorter than 8 characters, 
and see if the problem persists (or, if someone listening has a long 
"short name", and doesn't see the problem, speak up).

Regards,

Justin

--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large  *
Institute for General Semantics        |   If you're not confused,
                                        |   You're not paying attention
*--------------------------------------*-------------------------------*

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