[RndTbl] ls auto-quote rant
Trevor Cordes
trevor at tecnopolis.ca
Sat Feb 4 00:47:20 CST 2017
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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