Using ls -1 certainly helps if you are stripping content from the screen, but in recent years I have always found that using ls within a bash script (like if you use FILES=$((ls)) to get an array) returns a proper list correctly separated. It would not surprise me though if that is a feature of bash 4, I do remember we used to have to use the read command to get the appropriate output. So yeah, if all bash commands were simultaneously updated to strip those single quotes at the same time that it was added to the output of ls then it's probably not an issue. I still find it a completely useless annoyance just seeing them in the output and having to add flags to all of my desktops and servers to strip out content that I never asked for. If somebody wanted this then why not let them add a flag to their machines to include the feature?