While you are constrained as to the kind of input you get, maybe you don't need to stick rigorously to that constraint when presenting the info to the user. I would seriously consider editing the input list to normalize the date field to a consistent form, so that sorting on the date field will be trivial (as opposed to being complicated).

As suggested in an earlier reply, you should (if at all possible) use the SunOS 'ls' option that yields a consistent date format in its output, then use one of the many Date::whatever modules (or a regex) to convert that to YYYY-MM-DD HR:MI:SC, which doesn't need any special treatment when sorting (ascii-betic sort == chronological sort). People ought to find this display format easy enough to read, and you can use that edited form of the data for both sorting and display.

Don't hesitate to allow sorting on the permission field -- an (ascending or descending) ascii-betic sort on that can be surprisingly handy in some situations (e.g. to understand why some people aren't able to see the contents of some files...)

Meanwhile, the link-count and block-count fields are relatively worthless -- if you're going to be editing the 'ls' output anyway (to make the date field manageable), I would take those two out completely; don't even show them to a GUI user.

In reply to Re: Excel-like sort for multiple fields unix 'ls -l' output by graff
in thread Excel-like sort for multiple fields unix 'ls -l' output by cmv

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