As mentioned above, your "ls" is trying to be clever, and you just need to disable that -- but that's not the only source of the escape characters you're getting. The .bashrc (or maybe .profile ?) for the user account is setting the command prompt string to something "fancy" (maybe bold font?) as well.

If you can edit the .bashrc for this user account on the target machine, you can control both the "ls" behavior and the command prompt string: 

alias ls='/bin/ls --color=never'
PS1='$ '

[download]
(or maybe you want the prompt string to be something particular other than '$ ' -- it's up to you). If you can't edit that .bashrc file, just issue those two command lines first thing when you connect, and then only pay attention to the lines that are returned after that point. 

  if ( wantarray ) {
    my @a = split "\n", $r;
 #   chomp( @a );
    return \@a;
  } else {
    return $r;
  }

[download]
(the chomp removes zero chars, by the way)
Well, in the case where "wantarray" returns true, of course chomp does nothing, because split /\n/ removes all the line-feed characters.

In reply to Re: odd escape chars in strings obtained by SSH by graff
in thread odd escape chars in strings obtained by SSH by danmcb

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