bug#69261: Further discussion on option processing

[Paul Eggert]

On 2024-02-20 12:33, Mathias MICHEL via GNU coreutils Bug Reports wrote:
> I don't understand why --hide is depending on whether FILEs were provided
> or not to the command. This is the opposite of what Paul stated.

It's not the opposite of what I stated. I said that --hide affects only 
files that 'ls' finds in directories itself (e.g., via ls -R); it does 
not affect command-line arguments. That's the behavior you're observing, 
and that's the documented behavior.

As for "why", it's similar to ls's behavior with files starting with 
".". Normally ls doesn't display them, but if you give an explicit 
command-line argument (e.g., "ls -d .") it displays them, regardless of 
whether you've also specified -a or -A or whatever.

It's not likely that we'd change ls's behavior for the command-line 
arguments you gave, as it's been behaving this way for years and other 
people likely depend on this behavior. However, you can get get the 
behavior that you want by using a different set of command-line 
arguments (see my previous email), so you might try doing that.