bug#22698: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[Paul Vint]

I understand the desire for this, and indeed copy-pasting from the output
of ls has been a bit of a pain from time to time, but on the other hand,
the output I now have (by default) from ls is more difficult to read. now
when I type ls in a directory with a couple files with spaces in their
names, since they are enclosed in quotes, those files jump out at me in the
listing. To me, it makes the directory listing harder to read, especially
when you are scanning it to see "what did I call that file last month?" or
similar.

When I'm scanning a directory listing looking for something my eyes scan in
a vertical fashion, and having some filenames "indented" with a quote
messes me up.

Yes, I know I can use an alias or something to add the -N, but am I to do
that on all of my servers too? Can the people who *want* this not do that?

I appreciate the argument regarding making it easier for new users, in fact
I'm VERY much in favour of that, but isn't quoting some filenames but not
others also potentially inherently confusing for new users?

I really do understand the desire for this, but I also feel that it's more
disruptive than it is convenient.

My $0.02

Paul


On 18 February 2016 at 11:55, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 02/18/2016 08:31 AM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
>
>> keep the new
>> option for nice folks like Eric who have this minority use case.
>>
>
> It's not a minority use case, and this is not simply an issue of cutting
> and pasting: it's an issue of having unambigous output. The old behavior
> was ambiguous, and this repeatedly led to confusion.
>
> A couple of other points. First, the change is unlikely to break scripts,
> as it has no effect if the output of 'ls' is a pipe or a file. Second, the
> original Unix 'ls' did not escape file names at all, and GNU 'ls' had
> already deviated from its behavior by doing some file-name escaping by
> default when the output is a tty; all that's changed in the recent release
> are details about the default escaping method, to make it unambiguous.
>
>
>
>
>