Re: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[Michael Stone]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 01:17:09AM -0800, you wrote:
> compared to the suggestions I got privately to commit suicide.
> The vocal minority feel strongly about change.

Yeah, it's the discussions on other forums I was reacting to. Crazy.

> ls is really quite difficult to parse programmatically.
> I expanded on an example elsewhere, showing how awkward
> and non practical it is.

Agree completely, if someone's piping ls to their script they're doing 
it wrong. The case I'm thinking about is simply copy and pasting a 
filename into a script.

> An improvement suggested by someone else, would improve both the ambiguity
> and the small alignment issue, by adding an extra space to ls -l output
> if any names are quoted. That would also give a better indication that
> ls was adding the quotes. I.E.:
>
> -rw-rw-r--.   1 padraig padraig    580 Dec 14 04:01  blah_blah
> -rw-rw-r--.   1 padraig padraig    580 Dec 14 04:01 'blah blah'

I saw that, it's certainly an improvement for -l but doesn't do anything 
for plain ls.

> > 'I don'\''t think this is optimal.docx'  'My eye'\''s bleedin'\''.docx'  
> > Simple.docx
>
> Again these are edge cases.

I think the crux of the matter is how common that is on a particular 
system. For some people it's being hit often, and for those people it's 
a major regression in simple readability. 

> As Eric suggests it might be appropriate to use
> double quotes to simplify this "common" case.

It's hard to say. It certainly makes it look better, but having three 
different possible states for a filename (no quotes, single quotes, 
double quotes) makes the surprise factor even worse. 

> > In contrast, the case for the change doesn't seem that compelling:
> >
> > "It's less ambiguous" -- Maybe in some ways, but are there real-world
> > cases where it's a useful distinction?
>
> Yes. I've hit this many times with spaces in names.

I guess it comes down to whether someone mouses more than they type & 
tab complete.

> > If reducing the ambiguity of the output is really a goal, then the quoting
> > should be pervasive/consistent rather than changing on a per-file basis.
> > It should also be minimally verbose. I'd rather see the default be
> > --quoting-style=c than --quoting-style=shell-escape.
>
> Each to their own :)
> But that would be less directly usable on the shell.

I'm a tcsh user. :-) 

Mike Stone