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linuxbashshlsquoting

Newlines not quoted properly in ls -Q

Using ls -Q with --quoting-style=shell, newlines in file names (yes, I know...) are turned into ?. Is this a bug? Is there a way how to get the file names in a format that's 100% compatible with a shell (sh or bash if possible)?

Example (bash):

$ touch a$'\n'b
$ for s in literal shell shell-always c c-maybe escape locale clocale ; do
      ls -Q a?b --quoting-style=$s
  done
a?b
'a?b'
'a?b'
"a\nb"
"a\nb"
a\nb
‘a\nb’
‘a\nb’
Solution

  • coreutils 8.25 has the new 'shell-escape' quoting style, and in fact enables it by default to allow the output from ls to be always usable, and to be safe to copy and paste back to other commands.