Re: The ls command
On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 9:54 PM David <bouncingcats@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Oct 2025 at 03:44, Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 04:26:06 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > This whole thread is insane.
> True.
What I find puzzling, though, we have from OP:
] I have a Debian 12 setup running on a desktop PC.
] I am trying to list my PDF files using the ls command.
] I ran
] ls *.pdf
] and received the error message
] Invalid option '--K'
] No files were listed.
and subsequently:
]] Also, alias ls = ls -CF
However, testing on Debian 12 I can't come close to that behavior.
So, I wonder if OP isn't on Debian 12,
and/or OP isn't (via the alias) using ls from coreutils.
Notably on Debian 12 and using the ls from coreutils,
and with or without such an alias, I can easily get results like:
$ ls *.pdf
ls: unrecognized option '--K.pdf'
Try 'ls --help' for more information.
$
Notably I'm unable to find a way to, as OP presumably invoked,
get ls from coreutils to complain about option '--K',
but rather only the name of the file (interpreted as option)
starting with --K and ending with .pdf extension.
Also, the diagnostic is also quite different - "Invalid option" vs.
"unrecognized option". I don't know if there's any language/locale setting
that could be changed to get it to match what OP reported,
and even if that were to match, I doubt that would change the
reporting from '--K' to '--Kfilename_ending_in_.pdf' or vice versa.
So, not sure what might cause that. Maybe OP is using an atypical
shell that, e.g. further splits after * matching, but then would also
still need to account for the differences in the wording of the diagnostic.
Perhaps OP isn't even running Debian at all, or misreported the diagnostic?
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