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…