Follow-up Comment #1, bug #45780 (project findutils): Thanks for the report. However, your example output seems to be mangled: as find(1) is using "%6s " for the inode numbers, you cannot get a smaller inode "column" than 6 characters.
$ find/find /home /var /dev /media -maxdepth 0 -ls 2 4 drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Nov 9 2014 /home 262146 4 drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Nov 9 2014 /var 1025 0 drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4580 Aug 16 22:27 /dev 1048577 4 drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Nov 9 2014 /media Are you sure you are using the original GNU find? (Downstream distributions may have added patches to modify this behaviour btw.). Anyway, the basic observation is correct: the alignment may vary among the output lines. The reason is that find(1) outputs the -ls line per entry immediately, while "ls -dils" internally calculates the biggest inode number width of all arguments prior to actually outputting the entries. The point is that find(1) is made for an unlimited number of entries to find, thus making it impossible to internally calculate and store all entries like ls(1) does. BTW: ls(1) does the same pre-calculation on a per-directory basis when running recursively, i.e., you may get different alignment due to the inode numbers at least for each (sub-)directory. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?45780> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/