On GNU systems you can use ls -Q, which puts double quotes around file names, and escapes newlines as \n and quotes as \". Or the -b option, which does just the escaping without quoting. That output can be parsed unambiguously.

Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to Re: How to efficiently parse "ls -a"? by moritz
in thread How to efficiently parse "ls -a"? by isync

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