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OMG Ubuntu 18.04 LTS wraps all my files up in single quotes!

created May 14, 2018, last updated July 2, 2019.

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closeThis post was last updated 5 years 10 months 8 days ago, some of the information contained here may no longer be actual and any referenced software versions may have been updated!

Don’t panic.

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

Comments

  1. Ron says:

    This BS changes breaks 45+ years of Unix tradition, and the Principle of Least Surprise. “If a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to redesign the feature.”

    • Jorge says:

      I’m 56 years old and have been using Unix (and almost every derivative) since I was 16 — that’s 40 years. I’m OK with this change. it’s only a feature of ls(1) and it doesn’t wrap the filename in quotes if stdout is not a tty. Seems like nothing breaks here.

      I have seen long filenames with spaces in them in ls output where I could not tell where the filename started and stopped (because of the column output or wide output format that I used at the time). So I switched to ‘ls -l’ to get the long format and I can see then, but it was an additional step that this change makes unnecessary now. I see this as a good change.

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