Re: broken ls in coreutils 8.25 (original) (raw)

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From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: broken ls in coreutils 8.25
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2016 06:30:03 -0700
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On 02/01/2016 11:17 PM, Harald Dunkel wrote:

Hi Pádraig,

On 02/01/16 17:07, Pádraig Brady wrote: > On 31/01/16 06:48, Harald Dunkel wrote:

> The reasons we changed the default was:

> - It only happens when outputting to terminals

This means if you use "ls -1 | somescript" the script will not see the quoting style. Don't you think that this is inconsistent, not to mention that a script would benefit much more from this quoting style than a human?

No. ls already behaves differently when not outputting to a terminal (that is, 'ls | somescript' and 'ls -1 | somescript' behave the same, because a non-terminal implies -1).

> - It disambiguates the output for users

This means that the user has to count '' and "'" in the output of ls to get the "real" filename.

Yeah, but which are you more likely to do, retype the "real" filename manually (and insert your own shell quoting as appropriate), or copy-and-paste the existing output with a mouse click or two?

> - Output can be pasted back in the shell for further processing

This means that it useful only on a graphic terminal, for people using a mouse, but it affects all users using "ls"

These days, how many users are NOT using a graphical terminal? Again, it only affects output to a terminal, and it is very easy to adjust your login setups to change the defaults to something you like, so that your terminal behaves the way you want.

-- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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