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
