Why is 'ls' suddenly wrapping items with spaces in single quotes?
Preface: While it may be quite satisfying to upvote an answer such as this and call it a day, please be assured that the GNU coreutils maintainers do not care about SO answer votes, & that if you actually want to encourage them to change, you need to email them as this answer describes.
Update 2019:
Sometime this past year the maintainers have doubled-down and now offer to any [email protected] reports about this issue only a boilerplate response pointing to an incredibly long page on their website listing problems people have with this change that they have committed themselves to ignoring.
The unceasing pressure from [email protected] reports has clearly had an effect, forcing the generation of this immense & absurd page, and potentially reducing the number of maintainers willing to deal with the problem to only one.
When this many people consider a thing a bug, then it's a bug whether maintainers disagree or not.
Continuing to email them remains the simplest way to encourage change.
"Why is this happening?"
Several coreutils maintainers decided they knew better than decades of de facto standards.
"How do I stop it properly?"
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils.html:
Bug Reports
If you think you have found a bug in Coreutils, then please send as complete a bug report as possible to <[email protected]>, and it will automatically be entered into the Coreutils bug tracker. Before reporting bugs please read the FAQ. A very useful and often referenced guide on how to write bug reports and ask good questions is the document How To Ask Questions The Smart Way . You can browse previous postings and search the bug-coreutils archive.
Distros that have already reverted this change:
Debian coreutils-8.25-2Including consequently, presumably, Ubuntu and all of the hundreds of Debian-based and Ubuntu-based derivatives
Distros unaffected:
- openSUSE (already used -N)
"Any way to fix this without a recompile?"
Proponents would have you...
get back to the old format by adding -N to their ls alias
…on all of your installs, everywhere, for the remainder of eternity.
You can chose quoting style:
ls --quoting-style=literal
The same as:
ls -N
or:
QUOTING_STYLE=literal ls
Make it an alias, or set export QUOTING_STYLE=literal in your .bashrc to achieve pre-8.25 behavior.
A few points about the change.
- It was introduced in coreutils v8.25, and alignment improved in v8.26
- It only happens when outputting to terminals so doesn't break scripts
- It disambiguates the output for users for files containing whitespace
- It sanitizes output so it is safe to copy and paste
- Output is now always valid to copy and paste back to shell
- Users can get back to the old format by adding -N to their ls alias