Re: dired-do-touch

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:
>> From: Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>
>> Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 22:15:19 +0300
>> While I agree that we don't have to emulate the `touch' program
>> format, I think that we ought to add it as one of the possible time
>> formats accepted by the `date-to-time' and other Emacs time-parsing
>> functions, because this format is very compact which makes it
>> convenient for the user to enter.
>
> ``Convenient''?  IMHO, you need to be a CS graduate just to understand
> it.  Take a look at the Yacc parser summoned for the implementation of
> the "--date" option, or at the node in fileutils.info that documents
> it.

AFAIU, it's what the parse-time.el tries to do.  We could just add
the "-t TIME" format to it.

> Even the simpler "-t TIME" option's format is not easy to get right: I
> always confuse the traditional (and insane) MMDDhhmm[YY] format with

The older format is purely "ill-logical".

> the newer [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] format and need to consult the docs to
> be sure I don't screw up my time stamps.

The newer format makes more sense because it's like the ISO 8601 format.

> I wish Emacs had something more human-friendly, perhaps accessible via
> mouse clicks on the date/time fields of the Dired display or some such.

It's a good idea to change file attributes diredctly (I mistyped this word
instead of "directly", but the new word makes sense :-) on a dired buffer.

There also was a suggestion to make dired permission fields editable.

BTW, I think that since we will modify the file mode changing command
to use the primitive, we could add a `rwxrwxrwx'-like format to formats
acceptable by the `set-file-modes' (or perhaps to a new mode-parsing
wrapper around it).

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/