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The problem

I don't want to see filenames quoted when they contain spaces.

Example

On OSX I see this when running ls:

> ls -l total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 mafro staff 68 Mar 16 09:02 'dir with spaces' drwxr-xr-x 2 mafro staff 68 Mar 16 09:02 dir_with_spaces

On my Debian box it looks like this:

> ls -l total 8 drwxr-xr-x 2 mafro mafro 4096 Mar 16 09:02 dir with spaces drwxr-xr-x 2 mafro mafro 4096 Mar 16 09:02 dir_with_spaces

My shell is zsh with prezto and a tiny amount of my own customisation. I (should) have exactly the same dotfiles on both boxes

Here's ls. It's the same on both systems:

> which ls ls: aliased to ls --group-directories-first --color=auto
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  • 2
    You'll get the quoting on newer Debian releases, too. See Why is 'ls' suddenly wrapping items with spaces in single quotes Commented Mar 16, 2016 at 14:32
  • @MarkPlotnick you should make this comment an answer! I've searched high and low for this and didn't find that link you sent :) THANKS Commented Mar 16, 2016 at 16:10
  • @MarkPlotnick Debian undid this change in the mailing list because the maintainers agreed with me (asker of the question you linked) that it was a bad idea. Commented Apr 10, 2016 at 1:51

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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This is a new feature of Coreutils ls.

From the info documentation:

‘-N’
‘--literal’
‘--quoting-style=literal’

Do not quote file names. However, with ‘ls’ nongraphic characters are still printed as question marks if the output is a terminal and you do not specify the ‘--show-control-chars’ option.

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To disable this feature, add export QUOTING_STYLE=literal to your ~/.bashrc or, if you are using recent GNU coreutils with shells that don't support export var=value, use:

QUOTING_STYLE=literal export QUOTING_STYLE

IMO, the recently added quoting styles are a good feature, but they should not have changed the default behaviour because It breaks too many existing scripts and command line habits - especially for people who are doing the Right Thing and properly quoting their variables.

BTW, Debian reverted the behaviour in coreutils 8.25-2, so it was only present briefly in sid in 8.25-1.

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  • It's still present in Arch Linux, however. Commented Mar 17, 2016 at 9:55
  • @ams I feel bad for you. Commented Apr 10, 2016 at 1:52
  • Upvoting but I thought I'd point out that the new(ish) output-style is only used when stdout is a terminal so it shouldn't break any scripts – and parsing ls was never a good idea: see unix.stackexchange.com/a/128987/22812 and mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs Commented Nov 9, 2018 at 15:30

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