Re:Show HN: Command Line Challenge
by garettmd on Thursday January 26, 2017 @01:27PM
(#13493853)
I guess my point is that "ls" shouldn't be an answer. Typically it will print out multiple files on a line. If it's just checking for output and not the actual command someone entered, there should probably be more than one file in the directory to show that it will actually print one file per line.
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The mostly correct answer is `ls -1`. Just mostly, because it falls to the classic unix trap (filenames can contain almost anything) which also shows that the challenge is ill defined. What is the expected result if the filename contains newlines?
And this is not just some hypothetical scenario, just today at work I encountered a file with cursor movement terminal escape sequences in the filename.
`ls -1b` should work correctly in your case. Option -b (or --escape) enables C-style escapes. IMHO, it should be on by default.
Because it is executed outside of a terminal (the execution isn't in javascript) you get a single column output. Probably would be better to be more specific in the descriptions, thanks for the suggestion.
Although it often doesn't get printed like that, shells do consider the output of `ls` to be multiple lines. Try doing `ls > foo.txt` and looking at the output file (or more directly, `ls | wc -l`).