bug#22696: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[Ruediger Meier]

On Tuesday 16 February 2016, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 02/16/2016 10:48 AM, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> > If the file name _is_ readable at all, then it was printed in a
> > more readable way.
>
> Sorry, I'm not following. What do you mean by "readable at all"?

I've ment printable should be just printed as is. Please no wrong 
assumptions that any user would want to copy/paste any ls output into 
the next shell prompt.

> > Other tools
> > like less, more, texteditor, webbrowser don't print non-printable
> > chars. Why ls?
>
> If by "non-printable" you mean the character can't be displayed on
> the terminal, then these other tools typically use escape sequences
> to represent non-printable characters unambiguously, which is the
> sort of thing that 'ls' is doing now. For example, the shell command:

>    printf '\3' | less
>
> puts a highlighted ^C on my screen. This is the same basic idea that
> 'ls' is now using when it puts ''$'\003' on my screen.In both cases,
> an escape sequence is being used, not merely to prevent the screen
> from being trashed, but also to represent the input unambiguously.

The _old_ ls did it like a text editor, only translating non-printable 
chars into "something". An editor which would quote any ! or ? would be 
insane (Editor developers help shell newbies!?). The new ls output 
assumes that you don't want to read file names but only want to 
copy/paste it to a shell. But if you need to copy/paste that filename 
into a text editor where you want to add this file name to C #define 
then you have to remove the useless shell quotes/escapes again.

Maybe LANG=C should give us C-style char* output!?

cu,
Rudi