Don’t Quote Me

It appears that the coreutils developers have gone rogue and changed the default format of the ‘ls’ command, instead of being sensible and showing a filename like this:

What's New Scooby-Doo? (2002)

it now shows this:

'What'\''s New Scooby-Doo (2002)'

The fix is to add:

export QUOTING_STYLE=literal

to the .bashrc file.

(source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/258679/why-is-ls-suddenly-wrapping-items-with-spaces-in-single-quotes)