so the strangest thing happened, ls suddenly started putting '' quotes around files with spaces in the name quite useful, and unexpected.. but i wonder if that'd break any scripts.. :) That's ls(1) and not your shell? GNU ls (coreutils >= 8.25): "ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell, when outputting to a terminal." Oh that's fun. coreutil 8.25 on ubuntu doesn't seem to be doing it it took me by surprise That's what she said!! it was disabled in debian because of https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=813164 but now it's back again: https://packages.qa.debian.org/c/coreutils/news/20171002T184925Z.html Aha, -N to get the correct behavior back. Updating my GNU dotfiles now in preparation ... http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=109b9220cead6e979d22d16327c4d9f8350431cc typical gnuism They try really hard to put the NU in GNU. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2015-11/msg00016.html i think there should a normal ls, and then there can be gls or such what a disaster. srsly srsly haha