[RndTbl] ls auto-quote rant

Adam Thompson athompso at athompso.net
Sat Feb 4 07:23:13 CST 2017


*sigh*
If it was a grand conspiracy by the *BSD folks (and possible Oracle, IBM, and HPE) to drive people to other UNIXes, this might actually make sense.
As-is, *&^%$#@!.
-Adam


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roundtable [mailto:roundtable-bounces at muug.ca] On Behalf Of
> Trevor Cordes
> Sent: February 4, 2017 00:47
> To: MUUG RndTbl <roundtable at muug.ca>
> Subject: [RndTbl] ls auto-quote rant
> 
> Paging Lennart... paging Lennart... he must be around here
> somewhere...
> 
> Fedora 24 (and all cutting-edge distros) has a nice surprise:
> 
> >touch filenospace
> >touch file\ with\ spaces
> >/bin/ls
> 'file with spaces'  filenospace
> 
> Huh?  I don't recall putting single-quotes in the filename.
> http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/258679/why-is-ls-suddenly-
> wrapping-items-with-spaces-in-single-quotes
> 
> Oh, so the genius "we know better than 45 years of *NIX" people strike
> again.
> 
> 	"Why is this happening?"
> 	Several coreutils developers decided they knew better than
> decades
> 	of de facto standards.
> 
> This change appears in coreutils 8.25-something.  If you're running an
> older distro with 8.24, thank your lucky stars.
> 
> Fix is... very systemd-esque ("it's your fault, you must do something to
> return to normalcy"):
> 
> >/bin/ls -N
> file with spaces  filenospace
> 
> So update all your aliases folks, on every system, and re-source the alias
> file... assuming this would drive you as batty as it does me.
> 
> Debian has reverted this change as they realized it was insanity.  Fedora
> hasn't (I don't even see a bz for it).  OpenSUSE already aliases to -N by
> default.
> 
> The coreutils devs seem to think this bug is a good thing so as to make
> cutting & pasting consistent for noobs.  Hmm, I'm not sure noobs are
> using the command line all that much, at least not enough to cause the
> old hands to go insane.  And I'm still of the school that spaces don't
> belong in filenames unless absolutely necessary!
> 
> What's your take?  Any one for this change?
> 
> /RANT
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