Coretutils 8.25+ adds single quotes to filenames containing spaces  when listed with ls

ls -al
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 May 14 11:41 ‘file with spaces’

When you first see this you may think “WTF has happened to my files” – stay frosty :

• 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
• you can get back to the old format by adding -N to the ls alias or set export QUOTING_STYLE=literal in your .bashrc

And relax – all is well…

Taken from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/258679/why-is-ls-suddenly-wrapping-items-with-spaces-in-single-quotes