Option to show permissions in Octal

[alohawolf]

Even though I've been using unix systems for 20 years, I can never remember how to convert a permissions mask to octal in my head, so I have to use a little calculator to convert it, a killer feature for exa would be to show permissions in octal as well as the standard permissions mask style.

[ariasuni]

I’m not sure if that’s very useful to have both displayed at the same time? It would be the first time that exa displays the same information twice in different formats…

[alohawolf]

Even if you only offer a flag to display it in octal, this would still be helpful, I did read the man page, and saw no way to do that currently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609388#29617182

There were others who felt it might have some use, anyhow. Offering a switch for just octal, or ideally, allowing me to list both methods is ideal.

it's in much the same way you might want to see username and uid / groupname and gid

On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 11:32 AM Mélanie Chauvel @.***> wrote:

I’m not sure if that’s very useful to have both displayed at the same time? It would be the first time that exa displays the same information twice in different formats…

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[ariasuni]

Even if you only offer a flag to display it in octal, this would still be helpful, I did read the man page, and saw no way to do that currently.

It’s missing from the man page in the current released version, but there’s --octal-permissions.

it's in much the same way you might want to see username and uid / groupname and gid

I guess it can be useful, but it would complicate exa quite a bit to be able to handle those kind of cases, so I want to be sure it would useful to a significant portion of the people using exa. Right now, I think that’s the first time I’ve been asked for «duplicated info in different formats», so I prefer to see if there’s interest before investing my time and energy on it.

[virchau13]

I would also like this functionality (only displaying octal permissions.)

I guess it can be useful, but it would complicate exa quite a bit to be able to handle those kind of cases

May I offer a suggestion? I'm not familar with exa's code base, but by a cursory glance into src/output/table.rs, it seems the easiest way to do this would be to split the Column::Permission into two - Column::ReadablePermissions and Column::OctalPermissions, and provide flags for toggling both.

This way, no more extra complexity is added, and users have an option on whether they want to display both (the current --octal-permissions), one or the other, or neither.

Also, in my opinion, it would be nice to be able to remove the leading zeroes.

[virchau13]

provide flags for toggling both.

I just realised this is actually the current behaviour... Sorry about that. :)

So I guess this issue can be closed then?

[ariasuni]

Yeah, the current behavior is:

• By default, show permissions in rwx style
• With --no-permissions, don’t show permissions
• With --octal-permissions, show permissions in octal

But yeah I’m gonna close that.