bug#22696: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[isabella parakiss]

On 2/17/16, Mike Frysinger <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 17 Feb 2016 01:41, isabella parakiss wrote:
>> On 2/17/16, Ruediger Meier <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > As already said in practice it is already configurable by different
>> > kind
>> > of distro-specific techniques or shell aliases. For example openSUSE
>> > has envvar LS_OPTIONS. Maybe we could support such LS_OPTIONS variable
>> > officially.
>>
>> Please no.
>> It's painful to write a script that has to fight its environment to use
>> tools with their default behaviour.
>> Fighting against GREP_OPTIONS is already extremely annoying.
>
> it's already done -- export QUOTING_STYLE to control default behavior

I wasn't aware of that, and it's been there since 1998, damn.
Thanks for letting me know.  It's only in info, not even in the man page
(unlike grep) and also pretty hard to find on the web...

> people should generally be avoiding ls in scripting anyways ...
> there is `find` and shell globs to cover most cases.

ls -l filename     is still the only portable way to obtain owner, group,
mode etc.  Good thing QUOTING_STYLE doesn't affect that.


---
xoxo iza