Re: UTF8 problems with "find -ls" ?

[James Youngman]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Halim Issa <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thursday 18 December 2008 11:37:36 James Youngman wrote:
>
>> The historic behaviour of -ls is to escape such characters.   See
>> "Unusual Characters in File Names" in the info documentation for find.
>
> Thanks - It just didn't occur to me that "normal" unicode characters would be
> "unusual" - was rather expecting that to cover escape sequences and such...

Yes.  I also think that the historic behaviour is unfortunate.

Sadly most changes to long-established behaviour are going to break
things for _somebody_, and as far as I can tell, making test releases
on alpha.gnu.org (like the current 4.3.x releases) doesn't seem to
much prepare people for the change being introduced in the stable
release series (currently 4.2.x).  People on this mailing list hear
about them and therefore know about the changes, but since most people
who use findutils don't subscribe to this list, they're surprised by
the changes when a new stable release series comes out.    It's
possible that having shorter-lived development release series might
help, but I'm not convinced.

If we do make a change to the escaping, it would be useful to make
things a little more consistent (for example, make -ls work more like
-print, perhaps).

James.