Ytdyklly

I just noticed that on one of my machines (running Debian Sid) whenever I type ls any file name with spaces has single quotes surrounding it.

I immediately checked my aliases, only to find them intact.

wyatt@debian630:~/testdir$ ls

'test 1.txt'  test1.txt

wyatt@debian630:~/testdir$ alias

alias ls='ls --color=auto'

alias wget='wget --content-disposition'

wyatt@debian630:~/testdir$

(picture)

Another test, with files containing single quotes in their names (also answering a request by jimmij):

wyatt@debian630:~/testdir$ ls

'test 1.txt'  test1.txt  'thishasasinglequotehere'''.txt'

wyatt@debian630:~/testdir$ touch "'test 1.txt'"

wyatt@debian630:~/testdir$ ls

''''test 1.txt''''  test1.txt

'test 1.txt'          'thishasasinglequotehere'''.txt'

(picture)

update with new coreutils-8.26 output (which is admittedly much less confusing, but still irritating to have by default). Thanks to Pádraig Brady for this printout:

$ ls

"'test 1.txt'"   test1.txt

'test 1.txt'    "thishasasinglequotehere'.txt"



$ ls -N

'test 1.txt'  test1.txt

test 1.txt    thishasasinglequotehere'.txt

Why is this happening? How do I stop it properly?

to clarify, I myself set ls to automatically color output. It never put quotes around things before.

I'm running bash and coreutils 8.25.

EDIT:
Appears the coreutils developers thought (link) it would be a good idea to make that a global default despite breaking the principle of least astonishment as well as 46+ years of UNIX tradition.

Any way to fix this without a recompile?

UPDATE - October 2017 - Debian Sid has re-enabled the shell escape quoting by default. This is just getting ridiculous. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=877582

And at the bottom of the reply chain to the previous bug report, "the change was intentional and will remain." https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=813164#226

I thought this was settled. Apparently not.

Update: Android toybox ls is now doing something similar to this but with backslashes instead of quotes. Using the -q option makes spaces render as 'question mark characters' (I have not checked what they are, since they're obviously not spaces), so the only fix I have found so far without rooting the device in question is to add this to a script and source it when launching a shell. This function makes ls use columns if in a terminal and otherwise print one-per-line, while tricking ls into printing spaces verbatim because it's running through a pipe.

ls() {

    # only way I can stop ls from escaping with backslashes

    if [ -t 1 ]; then

        /system/bin/ls -C "$@" |cat

    else

        /system/bin/ls "$@" |cat

    fi

}

Preface: While it may be quite satisfying to upvote an answer such as this and call it a day, please be assured that GNU developers 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.

"Why is this happening?"

Several coreutils developers 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 <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>, 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-8.25-2
  
  
  
  
  • Including 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