Quoting of unprintable characters in the output of find

[James Youngman]

At the moment, the -ls and -fls actions always quote 'unprintable'
characters, supposedly for compatibility with 'ls' itself.  However,
'ls' only actually does this if stdout is a terminal.

There is a tension then between aligning the behaviour of -ls with the
actual 'ls' in GNU coreutils, and preserving existing functionality.
The specific problem area would be if people have written programs
which rely on '-ls' and '-fls' always escaping their output even if
the otuput is to a plain file or pipe.

There is a second and somewhatr related problem.  Since sometime in
the 4.2.x series, -print, -fprint, -printf and -fprintf started
quoting their ouptut if it was going to a terminal.  Unfortunately
this was done via a gnulib gunction 'print_quoted'.  The
'print_quoted' function works very well but the fact is that it is
different to the result you get from '-ls'.  

I'm considering rationalising this situation somewhat.  However, there
is a ground rule: if a change is made, the output find produces will
be the same before and after the change, where the output is going to
a plain file (or any other file which is not a terminal).

This means that I'm considering changing the output quoting method for
-ls and -print where the output goes to a tty.  Should I also consider
changing -ls and -fls to just print the literal pathname if the output
is going to a non-terminal?

Or, should I leave things as they are, on the grounds that the current
behaviour doesn't seem to be hurting anybody?

Your thoughts appreciated.

regards,
James.