[TheOtherHobbes]

It's not about liking the behaviour, it's about the usual UNIX nonsense of arbitrary breaking decisions being made on the hoof for whimsical reasons - everywhere. Because no one cares enough to cooperate with others on these things outside of their own little sandpit.

Path handing is an important feature. It should be standardised and predictable. It doesn't even matter how it's standardised. What matters is that everyone uses the same system so there are no random surprises or thwarted expectations.

In a robust OS everything would be a lot more interoperable and standardised than it is in UNIX. Being able to pipe things around is not the killer feature it might be - not if you have to waste time pre/post translating everything for arbitrary reasons before you can do anything useful with it.

[cyphar]

The main way you'd be interoperating with ls is through pipelines, and GNU ls doesn't do any pretty-printing of paths when used in a pipeline (besides, arguably the correct way of handling paths that may have newlines or spaces embedded is with `find -print0` but that's a whole different topic). Or is there some other aspect of interoperability you're referring to?

But if we're being honest, path handling (as well as structured data) in shell scripts and pipelines has always been of the largest trash-fires in Unix -- while I don't personally like how Powershell solved the problem on Windows at least they tried to solve it.