Hi,
This came in post ls version 8.25.

If you do an ls of a file that doesn't exist, it puts quotes around the file in the error message.

E.g. if foo doesnt exist

# ls foo
ls: cannot access 'foo': No such file or directory

On older (pre 8.25 inclusive), you get,

# ls foo
ls: cannot access foo: No such file or directory

None of the quoting-style options change this.

Any ideas? I can potentially put alias and functions in place, but seems overkill.
It's for an automated regression system with expected output.

Cheers,
Ian

Would building or otherwise installing ls 8.25 and setting the automated regression system to use it (perhaps by putting it in a prepended PATH entry) be an option?

Is updating the automated regression system an option?

Yeah - that was one of my options.. just seems a bit overkill for a minor functionality change (I'm sure the change makes sense to someone).

Thanks.

I don't think you can rely on specific output formats, especially when it comes to error messages. Your program has to perform the test whether the file exists or not.

Other example: There have been heated discussions how ls should treat nonprintable or otherwise special characters in filenames. A recent revision of ls changed the behaviour. Again, the bottom line is that the output of ls is not standardized, and that you should not make assumptions.

It's not too hard to test for the existence of a file in Bash:

Thanks - I fully agree. If there is no backdoor to previous functionality, I'll implement something like this.

ls is part of GNU coreutils, the source code of which is linked from here: http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutil...ls.html#source

It's a simple search to identify the relevant commit and answer that question.

Your simplest fix is probably to quote the filenames in your expected output, but the better fix is to use a mechanism specifically intended to identify if a file exists (as per berndbausch's post), and which doesn't rely on a brittle error message.

look for nullglob or failglob
https://superuser.com/questions/5193...are-no-matches
https://mywiki.wooledge.org/glob

I'd guess your distro has an older version that can be used. Just replace it and watch for any updates.

I'm shocked it was updated at all.

You must not rely on the output of ls, but use nullglob or similar or other tool (written in perl/python/awk/shell/whatever).
from the other hand you may try to remove ' from the output with sed or tr or something else.

1 members found this post helpful.

An outstanding suggestion! Removing the quotes with sed is an excellent idea!

I assume the "automated regression system" shells out to ls and parses its output, and that for bad reasons that are unfortunately common in the industry, that cannot be changed.

in that case ls should be replaced by a script which will return the result using the expected form/style

It is unfortunately that someone is stuck with a system that parses ls output, as that should never have been implemented in the first place.

bagpussnz: The "correct" solution would obviously be to update the automated regression system. I assume that there are reasons (technical, bureaucratic, or otherwise) why you can't do that?

So the automated regression system has done it's job and detected a change.
Despite what @dugan suggests "for bad reasons that are unfortunately common in the industry, that cannot be changed", I fail to understand why it is needed to bend the new 'ls' output to match the old behaviour.

I consider the new behaviour to be better (e.g. differentiating a file name containing a space).

If that is not acceptable, stick with the old version.