Follow-up Comment #1, bug #64100 (project findutils): This is quite a sizeable chunk of the available namespace.
I suggest instead we agree a compatible way to extend things while staying mostly out of each other's way. Here's a strawman: %{ns/ns/path:keyword:flags} Here "flags" is the usual size and so on. ns/ns/path is just a namespace which serves to prevent collision and keyword describes the data to be formatted. For example, %{gnu/find:version:-20} might print the version number of a file, left-justified in a column of width 20. Other implementations of course would be welcome to implement formatting for gnu/find:version of course. We put the flags after ! instead of before the { so that we don't have to skip over flags to look at the keyword, and then have to go back to parse and understand the flags. I'm not sure that using : twice inside {} is a great idea because a different choice would probably make parsing easier. Since my first choice was !, I changed my mind because of the need/difficulty of escaping ! on Unix systems. So I fell back on : but maybe there's a better choice. This idea, by the way, is why GNU find's documentation lists %{ as reserved for future use. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64100> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/