Re: ls man page/quoting_style

[Pádraig Brady]

On 24/10/17 10:39, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 24/10/17 08:52, Michael Stone wrote:
>> There's no mention of the QUOTING_STYLE environment variable on the ls 
>> man page or help output. What about changing 
>>
>>       --quoting-style=WORD   use quoting style WORD for entry names:
>>                                literal, locale, shell, shell-always,
>>                                shell-escape, shell-escape-always, c, escape
>>
>> to something like
>>
>>       --quoting-style=WORD   use quoting style WORD for entry names:
>>                                literal, locale, shell, shell-always,
>>                                shell-escape, shell-escape-always, c, escape
>>                                (overrides QUOTING_STYLE environment variable)
>>
>> Which both hints that the environment knob exists and specifies their 
>> precedence.
> 
> Good idea. The following is pushed in your name:
> https://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=9fa178f

For reference, env vars are not ideal for user preferences
as they're significant when parsing command output (not a tty).
I.E. globally set env vars in user settings may cause bugs in scripts.
This is not a big deal in this case as QUOTING_STYLE=literal is
already the default for non tty.  Also ls output is exceedingly
hard to parse in a robust manner and is best avoided anyway.

cheers,
Pádraig.