bug#42766: file names with spaces are quoted in the output from ls

2020-08-09 Thread Paul Eggert 

On 8/8/20 9:09 AM, David Thomas wrote:

If most people think things are a bad idea, why do them?


I don't see any real evidence that most people think the change is a bad idea. 
Although there have been complaints, that doesn't mean most people are 
complaining, or that most people are unhappy about the change.


In practice I've found the new behavior to be significantly safer. I too often 
have to deal with files with shell metacharacters in their names (people send me 
all sorts of weird stuff). The old 'ls' behavior was quite dangerous in that 
respect.



at first I was typing out the quotes to cd into them. Then I discovered it 
still worked to cd into them without typing the quotes


What file names were these, exactly? If 'ls' is overquoting, that's something we 
could fix without affecting safety.

bug#42766: file names with spaces are quoted in the output from ls

2020-08-08 Thread David Thomas 
Hello,

I noticed the other day when running ls in a terminal that some file names with 
spaces were quoted. I was quite confused, as I was sure they hadn’t been saved 
with quotes at the beginning and end of the file name. I’m not someone who 
often uses the terminal, but I know enough of what I was expecting (that file 
names created without quotes shouldn’t have quotes around them) that it threw 
me way off. Some of what were quoted were directories, and at first I was 
typing out the quotes to cd into them. Then I discovered it still worked to cd 
into them without typing the quotes, which was at least better. But I really 
don’t want those quotes. They look weird, and they make me feel like I mistyped 
when I created the file or directory.

I did some more digging, and discovered that I can alias ls to ls -N to get rid 
of them, but I sure don’t want to have to make this new alias for every system 
I use from here on out.

I have already read every bit of 
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=813164#226 already and the 
stubbornness of the devs is surprising and disheartening.

Isn’t open source a friendly place? If most people think things are a bad idea, 
why do them? This isn’t something that helps new users—it’s just going to 
confuse them, like it confused me.

Please do us all a favor and revert the change. Thanks so much,

-David