Subject: bug#24926: ls output has been made ugly

From: Reuti <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2016 22:48:37 +0100

Hi,

Am 11.11.2016 um 22:23 schrieb Eric Blake:
> 
> Knowing the pitfalls makes it easier to justify why an output that is
> unambiguous

Will it honor alt-space at some point?

> was chosen as the new default over the previous ambiguous
> output; any further changes to the default are now a matter of
> fine-tuning about how much (or how little) decoration we can get away
> with, while still avoiding a regression to the situation of ambiguous
> output.

For copy and paste you don't need quotes around alt-space, but you don't see where it ends:

$ ls --quoting-style=literal
a b  a b  a  b	a   b   xx 
$ ls --quoting-style=shell
'a b'  a b  a  b  a   b   xx 
$ ls --quoting-style=shell-always
'a b'  'a b'  'a  b'  'a   b'  ' xx '
$ ls -l
total 0
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:13 'a b'
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:13 a b
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:17 a  b
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:17 a   b
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:45  xx 
$ ls -l --quoting-style=shell-always
total 0
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:13 'a b'
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:13 'a b'
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:17 'a  b'
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:17 'a   b'
- -rw-r--r-- 1 reuti staff 0 Nov 11 21:45 ' xx '

Personally I like only the two options to quote always (as you expect such names) or never, but not to quote sometimes.

- -- Reuti