Re: broken ls in coreutils 8.25

[Tomas Nordin]

Pádraig Brady writes:

> 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

Or could it be that users who like to copy/paste file names in a
terminal can be guided to add something like --quoting-style=shell to
their ls alias. No? I never read or heard of this being a problem.

> 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

-- 
Tomas Nordin (The computing freedom explorer)