Re: broken ls in coreutils 8.25

[Pádraig Brady]

On 31/01/16 06:48, Harald Dunkel wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> how comes that suddenly I have to define an environment variable
> 
>       QUOTING_STYLE=literal
> 
> for something that worked very well since the 70s? I appreciate
> your continuous effort to improve coreutils, but this change is a
> bad move.

The reasons we changed the default was:

 - It only happens when outputting to terminals
 - It disambiguates the output for users
 - Output can be pasted back in the shell for further processing
 - Users can get back to the old format by adding -N to their ls alias

I see some disadvantages as:

 - Slightly misaligns -l output when some files have spaces
 - Produces longer output for file names with single quotes

So that's 2 functional advantages over 2 aesthetic disadvantages.
Given the advantages especially for new users and the complications of
producing shell quoted file names oneself, we chose the new default.

thanks,
Pádraig