Re: ls man page/quoting_style

[Michael Stone]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 06:30:21PM -0700, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> 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.

My personal objection to things like "QUOTING_STYLE" is that they're 
awfully polluting of the namespace and should have been something like 
COREUTILS_QUOTING. All water under the bridge now, just like the fact 
that ls is a horrible mismash of human readable functionality and de 
facto use in legacy scripts. Better if we could start over with ls 
having a flag for an easily parseable output mode that everyone could 
have gotten on board with 40 years ago, and a human mode that could be 
configured with dotfiles or something. Oh well.

Mike Stone