Hey. I've also just stumbled over this... while the idea is nice in principle, I think it's quite dangerous as well... even if behaviour is preserved when output goes to a terminal.
a) The quotation alone doesn't necessarily help with copy&paste, depending on where you paste. b) When the pasted content is actually further to be processed by e.g. old scripts (which expect perhaps one *unquoted* name per line) things will fail. c) We now have what you see is NOT what you get [when stdout is not a terminal] People do use ls in all it's variations in countless of scripts, and they build up their scripts by first trying it out on the terminal to see what they get is what they want to have in the script. But now, what they get is different in both. And the change isn't necessarily one that get's noticed, but it still may lead to all kinds of garbage, wrong files being deleted and so on. Consider a user writes a script that shall deleted all files from 2012... a stupid solution may be something like: rm -f "$( ls -1l | grep <some pattern that matches the date column> | sed "some pattern that removes everything up the filename" | xargs )" On the terminal this may give proper: rm -f 'file with spaces mythesis.pdf' in the script this would give rm -f file with spaces mythesis.pdf Well I'm not claiming that the above way is a proper way to delete files from 2012 ;-) ... but people often do such things... Long story short... this shouldn't be default but a opt-in. And if it really stays default, which seems just like tickling the dragon, it needs a NEWS.Debian entry. Cheers, Chris.
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