difference between `-- and -- after running npm list-CodePudding

Whilst addressing GitHub dependabot updates, I've been looking through the dependencies list created after running npm ls -a.

I (think I) understand the nesting involved: a pipe indicates that packages below are part of the dependencies list, and so on.

see image created from running npm ls -a > file.txt

What I don't understand is the difference between -- and `--.

After looking at it for the best part of an hour (embarassingly) my best guess is that `-- indicates the last package in a given nesting, whilst -- is an indication there are more packages.

It would be great if anybody could help clarify and enlighten me on what's getting output here.

CodePudding user response：

Yep, it just means "the last one at this level". Depending on your locale, npm draws a nice little Unicode box drawing "end hook" thing, or the approximation you were seeing:

/tmp/example > LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 npm ls -a
example@ /tmp/example
└─┬ [email protected]
  ├── [email protected]
  ├── [email protected]
  └─┬ [email protected]
    └── [email protected]

/tmp/example > LC_ALL=C npm ls -a
example@ /tmp/example
`-- [email protected]
   -- [email protected]
   -- [email protected]
  `-- [email protected]
    `-- [email protected]

If you don't want to change your locale, but do want npm ls to use the better-looking glyphs, you can pass --unicode.