On Wed, Feb 03, 2016 at 05:14:09PM +0100, you wrote:
If they are shown as \123\456, then I can at least copy & paste that name and use it. Which is why I think the idea of the changes implemented in the new coreutils is good in principle (though the current default quoting variant is IMHO one of the less readable ones).
But that will never work in general because different shells use different quoting styles. A more readable version would be something like the -Q output ("\123\456") but you can't use that to do the copy and paste. This is, I think, a case where most people would just resort to a GUI and people with mad command line skills could already cope.
Mike Stone
