Re: ls bug?

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden writes:

> It is verbose to print '?' to stdout since the error message is printed
> out to stderr and the exit status is non-zero, isn't it?

Sure, but 'ls' has partial information about the files in question: it
knows their names, it knows they exist, and it knows their file types.
5.2.1 'ls' in this case refused to print anything on stdout for such
files, which meant that useful information was suppressed.  Coreutils
6.9 'ls' prints everything it discovers, using '?' to denote unknown
values; the idea is that it's more helpful to output partial
information than no information.