On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 06:30:21PM -0700, Pádraig Brady wrote:
For reference, env vars are not ideal for user preferences as they're significant when parsing command output (not a tty). I.E. globally set env vars in user settings may cause bugs in scripts. This is not a big deal in this case as QUOTING_STYLE=literal is already the default for non tty. Also ls output is exceedingly hard to parse in a robust manner and is best avoided anyway.
My personal objection to things like "QUOTING_STYLE" is that they're awfully polluting of the namespace and should have been something like COREUTILS_QUOTING. All water under the bridge now, just like the fact that ls is a horrible mismash of human readable functionality and de facto use in legacy scripts. Better if we could start over with ls having a flag for an easily parseable output mode that everyone could have gotten on board with 40 years ago, and a human mode that could be configured with dotfiles or something. Oh well.
Mike Stone
