Plexus Components

date parsing of 'ls' output fails with german locale on macosx

Details

  • Type: Bug Bug
  • Status: Closed Closed
  • Priority: Major Major
  • Resolution: Fixed
  • Affects Version/s: plexus-io-2.0.2
  • Fix Version/s: None
  • Component/s: plexus-io
  • Labels:
    None
  • Environment:
    macosx 10.7.4
  • Number of attachments :
    0

Description

this is a followup on tycho bug https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=368089 where a symptom of this bug is that all file permissions are lost in a .tar archive.

The bug is that the output of 'ls -1lna' is locale-specific and e.g. with a german locale, the month and day columns are inversed on MacOS X.

example with german locale ( LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 )

$ ls -1lna
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 5 501 20 170 1 Jun 11:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 501 20 408 1 Jun 10:39 ..
rw-rr- 1 501 20 206 31 Mai 19:53 .project
rw-rr- 1 501 20 5227 1 Jun 11:02 pom.xml
drwxr-xr-x 3 501 20 102 31 Mai 19:59 workspace

example with english locale ( LANG=en_US.UTF-8 )

$ ls -1lna
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 5 501 20 170 Jun 1 11:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 501 20 408 Jun 1 10:39 ..
rw-rr- 1 501 20 206 May 31 19:53 .project
rw-rr- 1 501 20 5227 Jun 1 11:02 pom.xml
drwxr-xr-x 3 501 20 102 May 31 19:59 workspace

The bug is in AttributeParser [1] where the expected date format is "MMM dd HH:mm" but with a german locale it should be "dd MMM HH:mm" instead.

Maybe insteead of adding yet another date format to try a better fix would be to make sure the forked 'ls' always uses the same hardcoded LANG=en_US.UTF-8 env variable.

[1] https://github.com/sonatype/plexus-io/blob/master/src/main/java/org/codehaus/plexus/components/io/attributes/AttributeParser.java#L57

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Jan Sievers added a comment - - edited

e.g. 

ls -1lna --time-style=full-iso

would give a non-locale specific ISO format which is less error prone to parse.

Unfortunately I just verified that --time-style=full-iso is not portable across other versions of ls.
Using stat instead of ls

stat -c "%A %u %g %n"

would be safely parseable I think, but we would fork one stat process per file which I guess is not acceptable from a performance POV.

So the only options are either trying to set the LANG of the forked ls process to hardcoded "en_US.UTF-8" or to add yet another 2 date formats

new SimpleDateFormat( "dd MMM HH:mm" ) ,
new SimpleDateFormat( "dd MMM yyyy" )
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Jan Sievers added a comment - - edited e.g. ls -1lna --time-style=full-iso would give a non-locale specific ISO format which is less error prone to parse. Unfortunately I just verified that --time-style=full-iso is not portable across other versions of ls. Using stat instead of ls stat -c "%A %u %g %n" would be safely parseable I think, but we would fork one stat process per file which I guess is not acceptable from a performance POV. So the only options are either trying to set the LANG of the forked ls process to hardcoded "en_US.UTF-8" or to add yet another 2 date formats new SimpleDateFormat( "dd MMM HH:mm" ) , new SimpleDateFormat( "dd MMM yyyy" )
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Jan Sievers added a comment -

looks like there is/was a macos x bug
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040104152157563

causing month-day order to be reversed all the time (independent of locale)
still the parser should be able to handle reversed month-day order

Show
Jan Sievers added a comment - looks like there is/was a macos x bug http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040104152157563 causing month-day order to be reversed all the time (independent of locale) still the parser should be able to handle reversed month-day order
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Jan Sievers added a comment -

pull request for fix:
https://github.com/sonatype/plexus-io/pull/1

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Jan Sievers added a comment - pull request for fix: https://github.com/sonatype/plexus-io/pull/1

People

  • Assignee:
    Jason van Zyl
    Reporter:
    Jan Sievers
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    Updated:
    Resolved: