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

[Eric Blake]

On 02/06/2018 03:30 AM, Michael wrote:
> On 06/02/2018 08:13, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> > On 02/06/2018 12:41 AM, Michael Felt wrote:
> > > imho, the main problem is you change the default behavior, and 43 years
> > > of programs are broken.
> >
> > no, as explained it does not affect programs and scripts, because this
> > only changes the output to the terminal.
>
> Yes, I thought about that too. So, maybe I would have liked the choice 
> to be able to have them quoted IF and/or WHEN I needed to cut/paste 
> names. But now I must either not install coreutils (as I have that 
> option) or always remember to add three characters (' -N') everytime I 
> want normal ls output.

Not true.  Create a shell function or alias that turns 'ls' into 'ls -N' 
when invoked interactively; or even a shell script wrapper early on your 
$PATH that checks whether it is invoked with a tty as stdout.  Then when 
you use 'ls' interactively, you get the behavior YOU like; while scripts 
still get the behavior they are used to.

The default has to be sane for the widest set of use cases (which is why 
we changed it to quote by default for names that are otherwise ambiguous 
or dangerous to a terminal), but no one says you have to use the default 
without customization.

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org