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We make very careful considerations about the interface and operation of the GNU coreutils, but unfortunately due to backwards compatibility reasons, some behaviours or defaults of these utilities can be confusing.
This information will continue to be updated and overlaps somewhat with the coreutils FAQ, with this list focusing on less frequent potential issues.
Good tips and reminders for those who don't work mostly with a CLI (Command Line Interface).
[What has been YOUR biggest CLI gotcha? -Ed.]
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Hey, wait a minute!! I want a divorce!! ... you're not Clint Eastwood!!
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Tuesday December 01 2015, @10:05PM
I always turn on color. I've never seen results where the colors don't show up well against one another. Do you have some sort of old custom color settings sitting in your home or etc directories and overriding the default colors?
I can't stand distros where they are not on by default. Actually.. that's too strong... I think it's far more attractive with them on and distros should default them to on. But.. I suppose I could stand it if I had to. What I can't stand is that default .bashrc comment that says they are off because they are 'distracting'! What a loaded, subjective statement! I don't think they are distracting at all! A screen full of nothing but plain white text... to me that is distracting. Maybe not to you... They don't need that comment there.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday December 01 2015, @10:27PM
Same here. Colors make ls a lot more useful for me. I often just want a brief listing of files, not ls -l, and the color adds some information I can use.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @01:00AM
Ugh. The out-of-the-box Mint puts dark blue on black for me. If you don't change it, you need to put your nose right on the screen to read the text.
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Wednesday December 02 2015, @04:31AM
I too will agree. I like ls to use color by default.
My reasoning: a) it adds semantic information to what would otherwise be a homogeneous wall of filenames; b) you can turn it off it you don't like it; and; c) it lets new users know the colorization "feature" exists in an relatively unobtrusive way.
Like many others, I've come across ls colorizing using inappropriate colors for my terminal. (Probably happens more often to me: each new xterm I open uses a different foreground/background color scheme. My monitor looks like a candy shop and I don't loose track of which xterm is which as easily.) Whenever ls' colors don't work I smile and do a quick work-around because I'm grateful for the other 99% of the time they work well.