bug#22696: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[Eric Blake]

On 02/16/2016 04:09 PM, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 February 2016, Eric Blake wrote:
>> On 02/16/2016 03:13 PM, Ruediger Meier wrote:
>>> Do you really think that this ls output is clear to a newbie?
>>> $ ls
>>> 'a?b'  'a'$'\n''b'  axb  c  'd  e'
>>
>> A newbie isn't going to create a file with a newline in it; and the
>> others seem reasonable to me.
> 
> My mother does this all the time. It's easy with certain gui file-save 
> dialogues or file-browser rename functionalities.

Tabs, single quotes, and spaces, yes. But even in gui's, it's
surprisingly hard to create file names with a literal newline (and
that's a GOOD thing that it's hard, because someday it would be nice to
forbid newlines in filenames at all; the POSIX folks have at least
entertained a discussion of what it would entail to allow [not force,
but not forbid] a system that wants to reject newlines and non-UTF-8
filenames).

> 
> But I am the only one who looks at my mothers files using ls ...

And we're right back to: if you don't like how it looks on your system,
then YOU are in control by setting up an alias.  Just because the
out-of-the-box default doesn't match your preference doesn't mean it is
a bad out-of-the-box default.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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