A little DIR test

[mnrvovrfc]

I got stung when M$ went from Win98 command/c to later OS's using cmd/c for SHELL DIR output. M$ actually changed the formatting so the rows, where you would parse with MID$(), were changed.

Blame it on the "LFN", also because nothing had to be missed... something like "PROGRA~1" for "Program Files" and listed side by side. It wound up being a mind-boggling combination of beginning fragments of a filename, hexadecimal number then squiggle and then single-numeral. That was before doing anything with the suffix when that stopped being strictly three digits long.

Another thing is the accomodation for file sizes. Freckin' File Explorer for WindowsXP listing everything in KB, I think "DIR" command in "CMD.EXE" did the same thing and then those dumb-looking commas, a good thing for those of us growing old using M$'s stuff LOL.

I freaked out the first time I saw something like "1,110,101KB", and I facepalmed and shook my head while I kept seeing "0.97GB" in file copy progress or something like that. One of the app installer/remover programs to use at the Linux terminal, called "pacman" which is authored by the makers of Arch Linux, while downloading stuff likes displaying a package's size in KB if it's less than 2MB or so, which I can't understand. Two different file managers could confuse the user: the aforementioned "Caja" or "Nautilus" could display in the status bar something like "15.0GB" for disk space available, but a different file manager could say "14.6GiB" for the same thing. Finally there's "wget" which doesn't say straight away if it's "gibibyte" (multiple of 1024 middle syllable) or "gigabyte" (multiple of 1000) at something like "2.5G". The indication of how much memory is sickening on Linux these days.