Re: [PATCH] ls: Use pretty UTF-8 arrow when showing where symlinks point to

[Philip Rowlands]

On Thu, 6 Aug 2009, Lennart Poettering wrote:

> Diego Petten? complained that "ls -l" doesn't use the UTF-8 arrow
> character to show where symlinks point to. This tiny patch fixes that.
> With this applied the character is used when the CODESET is UTF-8
> otherwise we fall back to the traditional "->" arrow.
>
> Ah, "ls -l" is so much prettier now with this oh-so-important patch!
> For verification:
>
> http://pastie.org/573270
>
> This will of course break scripts that try to parse the output of "ls
> -l" and look for "->". But quite frankly those scripts are broken
> anyway and should be using "LC_MESSAGES=C" or suchlike. One could
> argue this breakage might even be desirable.

Why are scripts which look for "->" broken? It's explicitly stated in 
the standard:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/utilities/ls.html


Cheers,
Phil