Re: ls is broken, what's next cd?

[Harald Dunkel]

On 02/05/18 20:27, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> On 02/05/2018 07:45 PM, Kaz Kylheku (Coreutils) wrote:
>  > There is no need for this pointless garbage. Unix has gotten along
>  > without quoting the output of ls for 43 years now.
>
> If you search the mailing list archive, then you'll see that
> this has already been discussed (several times).
>
> IMO the main reason that the current implementation is the right
> direction is that file names became more and more "ugly" in the past
> 43 years.  Compare this quite easy cases:
>
>    $ /bin/ls -N
>    a b  c    d
>
>    $ /bin/ls
>    'a b'  'c '  ' d'
>
> You see, you can still use
>    alias ls='\ls -N'
> to get the old, IMO broken output.

Or you could keep ls' default behavior everybody (except for
a few) was happy with.

Seriously, the output of ls was never meant to be read by
anything but a human. Some of us are used to the traditional
output of ls for more than 30 years. No wonder that there is
resistance against changing the default behavior: It is just
distracting.

You have to admit that this is just weird (don't blame me,
I didn't start using weird file names in this thread):

% touch /tmp/\'abc\ def\'
% touch /tmp/abc\ def
% touch /tmp/\'abc\ def\"
% touch /tmp/\"abc\ def\'
% src/ls -l /tmp/*abc*
-rw-r--r-- 1 hdunkel users 0 Feb  7 10:00 '/tmp/"abc def'\'''
-rw-r--r-- 1 hdunkel users 0 Feb  7 09:59 '/tmp/'\''abc def"'
-rw-r--r-- 1 hdunkel users 0 Feb  7 09:59 "/tmp/'abc def'"
-rw-r--r-- 1 hdunkel users 0 Feb  7 09:59 '/tmp/abc def'

I wonder who is supposed to benefit from this change? For a
human eye these constructs are simply unrecognizable, unless
you look *very* closely.

For pipe processing you should consider "find -print0" and
"xargs -0".


Just my $0.02. Regards

Harri