Subject: WTF? Chmod (and presumably other coreutils) corrupt their own error messages with "smart" quotes...
From: Alain Knaff <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2017 22:44:17 +0100
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Hi,

Recently, while browsing error mails of some cron jobs, I noticed that
chmod puts "smart" quotes into its error messages.

IMHO, such gimmicks should have no place in core utilities.

At least this behavior should be optional via configuration or
environment setting (preferably off by default).

The faulty code lives in lib/quotearg.c in function gettext_quote

Even defining a custom locale that just maps quotes to themselves
doesn't work, because this function specifically tests for that case
(translation same as msgid), and then "manually" garbles the quotes.

Who came up with this? :-)

Thanks for fixing this,

Alain