On Nov 30, 2016, at 8:41 PM, Paul Vint <pjv...@gmail.com> wrote: > The alignment change is helpful, but I do have an argument against doing the > same in the -1 case: It breaks something many of us have done in scripts.
It breaks nothing. Quoting and alignment by default only happens when stdout is a tty. Also, ls prints one entry per line when stdout is not a tty; you don't even need -1. > Of course we *know* that ls -1 isn't the best way to go, but for quickie > scripts it has been the standby for many. Parsing ls output not only "isn't the best way", it's also wrong (tm). You know that, but I still want to point it out. Not saying compatibility should be broken; as already said, nothing is broken. > Also, I cannot come up with a good > reason why someone would use ls -1 unless they were scripting it. Pádraig already mentioned one: "When `ls -1` is used interactively it can be handy to triple click to select the whole line." Also, one per line is easier on my eyes. > (add to that, if anyone using the -1 argument that seems to imply that they > know what they are doing). Not sure what you're implying. > Having said that, I am thinking about it now an know that I have > used ls-1 before just to see the output, and I used it to see the honest > output > without any "noise" - no dates and times, no formatting, no anything, just > plain filenames. I think the "list one file per line." in the man page says it > right; just list it. That's more of an argument against quoting than alignment. You should probably open a new discussion (and you've had quite a while to do that). > As eluded to above, I cannot think of a scenario where someone would use ls > -1 and want it indented for them. The fact that I even bothered to open this issue probably says something about someone wanting to use `ls -1` and see the results aligned. Best, Zhiming
