"Some historical implementations of the ls utility show all entries in a directory except dot and dot-dot when a superuser invokes ls without specifying the -a option. When "normal" users invoke ls without specifying -a, they should not see information about any files with names beginning with a period unless they were named as file operands."
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/ls.html Cheers, Antonio Huete 2012/9/13 [email protected] <[email protected]>: > hi, > > it was just discovered that /bin/ls (without arguments) > if called by root-user > lists ".dotted" files > (while expected to hide ".dotted" files unless -A specified) > > even more surprising is > man ls > that clearly says: "-A is always set for superuser" > (which is absolutely peculiar!) > > WHY???????????????????????? > >
