Subject: bug#23422: stat -c %N returns strange results for file names including <TAB>

From: Ruediger Meier <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 May 2016 10:28:21 +0200

On Tuesday 03 May 2016, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 05/02/2016 03:19 PM, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> > This new quoting style default is just ugly, unreadable and
> > annoying.
>
> If you can think of an unambiguous output style that is beautiful,
> readable, and pleasant, please let us know.

Looking again at the OP's example
  'foo'$'\t''bar'
it's not so difficult to imagine a better quoting style. It would be 
more difficult to make it more ugly ... Nobody would ever type this 
string like this, mixing and changing the quotes a few times within one 
string. Moreover it's unusable for most use cases (except shell 
copy/paste).

The old behavior 'foo\tbar' seems like C style which was already nice to 
read and also unambiguous I guess. Adding a $ in front of that C string 
should work in shell too, or not?

Anyways the incompatible change is IMO not acceptable. %N is probably 
most likely used in scripts which rely on the known style. One argument 
to defend the ugly quoting style change in ls(1) was that it's usually 
only used interactively. This is not the case for stat -c.

cu,
Rudi