GNU bug report logs - #25495
WTF? Chmod (and presumably other coreutils) corrupt their own error messages with "smart" quotes...

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Package: coreutils;

Reported by: Alain Knaff <alain <at> knaff.lu>

Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2017 21:45:02 UTC

Severity: normal

Done: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>

Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Alain Knaff <alain <at> knaff.lu>
To: bug-coreutils <at> gnu.org
Subject: WTF? Chmod (and presumably other coreutils) corrupt their own error
 messages with "smart" quotes...
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2017 22:44:17 +0100

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
This bug report was last modified 8 years and 124 days ago.

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