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?
