I went back and looked at the bug report in additional detail and think I found the problem:

[This is from the bug report jfs posted.]

> $ dpkg --status fileutils |grep ^Version
> Version: 4.1.10-2
> jfs@hades:/tmp/jfs$ /bin/ls -L -lg -ld /home/aalonso

drwxr-sr-x    6 aalonso      4096 2002-07-17 23:37 /home/aalonso

Notice here that the group is NOT replaced by a number, instead the file owner is plain missing.  The above command has one less field then the command below.

> $  dpkg --status fileutils |grep ^Version
> Version: 4.1-10
> jfs@avalon:~$  /bin/ls -L -lg -ld /home/aalonso

drwxr-sr-x    6 aalonso  aalonso      4096 jul 17 23:37 /home/aalonso

The problem is the same problem I have run into with RedHat, SuSE, etc.  Newer versions of ls do not display the owner if the -g option is given. 

Here is the what the man page says about -g for the ls command on newer versions of ls:
     -g     like -l, but do not list owner

I believe my origional patch is correct for the following reason:

Every place the $LSGROUP is used we are interested in parsing the file owner.  So specifying the -g option is either ignored (older versions) or does not display the file owner.

removing the -g makes the ls command work correctly in all cases.

This patch forces the LSGROUP variable to just "-l".  The prevsious version performed a version check on fileutils and set LSGROUP="-lg" if the version was betwee 4.0 and 4.10. 

This has caused problems with RedHat in the past and is currently causing problems with SuSE.  I believe this check causes more harm then actual good because of the following reasons:

1. I believe the check/comment is wrong.  The only linux box I have access to that fixs into this category is on a RedHat  6.2 systems and the output of "-l" and "-lg" is the same.

$ ls --version | grep fileutils
ls (GNU fileutils) 4.0p

$ ls -l /etc/shadow
-r--------    1 root     root          946 Aug 28 20:09 /etc/shadow

$ ls -lg /etc/shadow
-r--------    1 root     root          946 Aug 28 20:09 /etc/shadow

2. When the check goes wrong (as in the cases I found with RedHat and SuSE) it looks like:

$ ls -l /etc/shadow
-r--------    1 root     root          835 Oct 18 12:00 /etc/shadow

$ ls -lg /etc/shadow
-r--------    1 root          835 Oct 18 12:00 /etc/shadow

which screws up checks dependant upon the output of ls.


If anyone knows of a reason why we should keep the -g then I feel the test should check for cases where the -g is needed and then add the -g option.