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

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:24:47 -0800

Michael Schwager wrote:
> please illustrate a real life problem

In general, file names can be chosen by an adversary. This is a real-life 
problem for me, and for many other people (whether they know it or not).

Eric Blake's arguments for leaving things alone are cogent ones.

You can try to track down the design discussion by doing a git blame and looking 
for something on the mailing list around the time the changes were installed.

Also, this may not be obvious, but you can avoid the ugliest part of the quoting 
by using the proper English-language character in your song titles. For example:

$ ls
Groovin’  'Higher Ground'  UB40

This works because ’ (U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK), the ordinary 
character to use in the English-language title “Groovin’”, is not subject to the 
off-putting replacement by '\'' (also, this character avoids other problems when 
cutting and pasting into the shell). This would be better than what you have 
now. Perhaps a suggestion along these lines should be put into the coreutils manual?