I could not get any satisfactory results using anything that parsed the output of ls -l into a word stream (bash, awk, column etc) because a) filenames with spaces in messed up, and b) ls -l's aligned columns messed up (for example, right-aligned filesizes). ls -l | column -t shows both problems at once.

I will get shot down for the inefficiency in this, but this is my eventual script that uses sed to replace parts of the output of ls -l maintaining column width:

day0=`date                     +"%b %_d"`

day1=`date --date "1 day  ago" +"%b %_d"`

day2=`date --date "2 days ago" +"%b %_d"`

day3=`date --date "3 days ago" +"%b %_d"`

day4=`date --date "4 days ago" +"%b %_d"`

day5=`date --date "5 days ago" +"%b %_d"`

day6=`date --date "6 days ago" +"%b %_d"`



min0=`date                        +"%H:%M"`

min1=`date --date "1 minute  ago" +"%H:%M"`

min2=`date --date "2 minutes ago" +"%H:%M"`

min3=`date --date "3 minutes ago" +"%H:%M"`

min4=`date --date "4 minutes ago" +"%H:%M"`

min5=`date --date "5 minutes ago" +"%H:%M"`

min6=`date --date "6 minutes ago" +"%H:%M"`

min7=`date --date "7 minutes ago" +"%H:%M"`

min8=`date --date "8 minutes ago" +"%H:%M"`

min9=`date --date "9 minutes ago" +"%H:%M"`



ls -lh --color=force --quoting-style=shell-escape "$@"|sed "

  /$day6 (.[0-9]:[0-9][0-9])/ s/$day6/6 days/; t

  /$day5 (.[0-9]:[0-9][0-9])/ s/$day5/5 days/; t

  /$day4 (.[0-9]:[0-9][0-9])/ s/$day4/4 days/; t

  /$day3 (.[0-9]:[0-9][0-9])/ s/$day3/3 days/; t

  /$day2 (.[0-9]:[0-9][0-9])/ s/$day2/2 days/; t

  /$day1 (.[0-9]:[0-9][0-9])/ s/$day1/yesday/; t

  /$day0 (.[0-9]:[0-9][0-9])/ s/$day0/ today/; T

  s/$min0/  now/; t

  s/$min1/1 min/; t

  s/$min2/2 min/; t

  s/$min3/3 min/; t

  s/$min4/4 min/; t

  s/$min5/5 min/; t

  s/$min6/6 min/; t

  s/$min7/7 min/; t

  s/$min8/8 min/; t

  s/$min9/9 min/; t

  "

Sample output of /var/log/syslog*:

-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm    9240  today   now /var/log/syslog

-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 1279965  today 8 min /var/log/syslog.1

-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   51750 2 days 14:12 /var/log/syslog.2.gz

-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   14768 3 days 10:59 /var/log/syslog.3.gz

-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm    7767 4 days 10:04 /var/log/syslog.4.gz

-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm  119295 5 days 09:49 /var/log/syslog.5.gz

-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   33450 6 days 13:06 /var/log/syslog.6.gz

-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   21372 Jan 25 11:12 /var/log/syslog.7.gz

(not sure why log appears here in red; it doesn't on my terminal.)

This is only used from the command line so all those date commands don't matter, in fact I don't notice any delay at all.

Update:

time output for `ls -l /var/log/syslog*':

real    0m0.002s

user    0m0.002s

sys     0m0.000s

time output for for my new script:

real    0m0.019s

user    0m0.018s

sys     0m0.003s