The output of "ls" automatically quotes results that include special characters or spaces. I've already found this page: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/quotes.html
I'm aware that the maintainers have no plans to revert the behavior, and I'm aware of the work arounds. This email is just to register another complaint / disagreement. The page above notes, "GNU Coreutils maintainers are of the opinion that this change is beneficial to most users". It's not beneficial to me and has caused a fair bit of work to restore the old behavior across a few hundred systems. I suspect that many users have yet to see this new behavior, as many of us run distributions with older utilities (ex. RHEL 7.x). FWIW, I'm firmly of the opinion that this should have been implemented at the distribution level as an addition to the default "ls" alias, leaving the default behavior of unadulterated /bin/ls use as-is (ie. behaving as --quoting-style=literal). That said, I don't know where you go from here, cause you've already committed to this change and it's all over the place now, and reverting would then cause a third condition... I'd still support reverting, but I realize that's unlikely, so don't worry about convincing me of why you won't revert. In the future, for new behavior such as this, I implore you to please stage the change in steps: * add an option to enable the behavior * encourage distros to make that the default for their distro via aliases * if $N percent of distros pick it up, then consider making it the actual default with an option to disable it Thank you, -- Josh I.
