Ah, OK.  It's actually a bug in Digital Unix's ls.

On Sun, 12 Dec 1999, David Faure wrote:

> [...]
> > For example kfm doesn't show
> > the file "big_file" which is there in ftp:
> > 
> > drwxr-xr-x   2 jgrg     informati    512 Jul 16 11:36 ad_hoc
> > drwxr-xr-x   3 jgrg     informati    512 Jan 12  1999 anno
> > -rw-r--r--   1 jgrg     informati1000000 Nov 19 14:35 big_file
> > -rw-r--r--   1 jgrg     informati 738406 Oct 26 18:44 bioperl-live.tar.gz
> > drwxr-xr-x   2 jgrg     informati    512 Feb 11  1999 course 
> 
> Well, this is a bug in ls, I would say.
> Here is what the same thing shows here :
> 
> drwxrwxrwx   2 root     root         1024 Dec 12 22:30 .
> drwxr-xr-x   7 root     root         1024 Nov  1 20:41 ..
> -rw-r--r--   1 dfaure   informat  1024000 Dec 12 22:30 bigfile
> -rw-rw-rw-   1 dfaure   users      341947 Apr  3  1999 hicolor.jpg
> -rw-rw-rw-   1 dfaure   users       32236 Mar 31  1999 konqtext.gif 
> 
> Note that the group name got truncated one letter before, and that
> there is more room for the size.
> 
> -- 
> David FAURE
> david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
> http://home.clara.net/faure/
> KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today
> 

James G.R. Gilbert
The Sanger Centre
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge                        Tel: 01223 494906
CB10 1SA                         Fax: 01223 494919