Rclone doesn't see dir, using escaped dirnames instead

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1

So I’ve been going a little nuts on Ubuntu 18.04. I have a directory which thankfully is not media, so I don’t have any apps touching it on a regular basis. I noticed that in my ls output the directory had single quotes around it, and I thought it was getting renamed by rclone initially:

‘Photo Archive Slow’
Even though the directory’s name is Photo Archive Slow

I only noticed because rclone would not find the directory! Turns out coreutils was updated and the debian-based distros have changed how ls works. Supposedly the change “doesn’t break scripts” but I think it did for me. If rclone is using ls, there’s an additional switch to use (-N). The stat command works as expected. I’m not sure it’s a bug per se, but I thought I’d post about it since moving apparently this will be an issue.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/258679/why-is-ls-suddenly-wrapping-items-with-spaces-in-single-quotes

2

What’s the actual error you are getting? I’m on Fedora and it’s been like that for quite some time and I never noticed any issues.

3

Yes that is a truly annoying change! I noticed it myself on 18.04 just recently and had the same initial panic.

rclone itself doesn’t use ls, but there may be 3rd party scripts people use which do.