one surprising interaction with ls i had recently was that it coloured files with capabilities differently, but it was pretty difficult to figure out what was g

one surprising interaction with ls i had recently was that it coloured files with capabilities differently, but it was pretty difficult to figure out what was going on. and that looks like a recent change, as in 2012 someone complained that ls didn't distinguish those at all: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LsShowCapabilities https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LsShowCapabil... so i had an executable that was behaving unexpectedly, somewhat similar to the linked write-up, which ls showed with black text on red background. for a while, until i remembered about capabilities, i couldn't figure out what the unusual colour meant. eventually i found the word 'capability' buried in https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/General-output-formatting.html https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Gene... compared to that, exa seems to be a bit more obvious with its '@' indicator (it would be nice if it was documented in the man page and not just in https://the.exa.website/features/long-view https://the.exa.website/features/long-view) and the -@ option to print xattr/capability names.