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0 pointsbaz002y ago0 comments

That's mostly rubbish though.

The reason ls works perfectly fine today is no one dares fuck with the interface in case they break everything that depends on 30 years of assumptions even if they do suck a little bit. That includes all the forks and rewrites.

This is almost entirely missing in "modern" software development. And I don't think any of us have time or energy really to track down varying different forks of something which needs to work like it did in 1990 when you run that shell script you wrote 15 years ago.

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cmrdporcupine2y ago

Tell me that you don't/haven't worked across a variety of Unix*en without telling me that you haven't...

Back in the day it was navigating all the crap between SunOS vs SysV, HPUX, AIX, BSD, etc and then later Solaris, Linux, etc Now it's OS X vs Linux coreutils vs busybox etc. They all have subtle different interfaces and while there is a common basis the reality is that 'ls' is a strange hill to die on for the point you're trying to make. Like 'ps', it's something people have messed with the flags and output a bunch of times...

As others have pointed out, there is no single `ls`, and it's been "replaced" in various systems many times. Yes, we have a contiguous usage of the GNU version for some time, but only really in Linux.

Homogeneity has never been the name of the game in Unix culture, I don't understand why people would insist on it now.

I say: Bring on the "modern alternatives". I just installed lsd. I used to keep a shell alias from lsd -> ls for years anyways :-)

baz00OP2y ago

I think you're reading me wrong.

I spent a good deal of time working on SunOS (right back to m68k stuff), Solaris, HP/UX, Linux and FreeBSD over the years and use macOS now and am more than aware of the inconsistencies.

My point is that we pretty much standardised on some basic semantics around each command and what is portable and what is not. And now we're considering moving away from those learnings back to the wild west again.

I consider GNU to be a particularly bad variety of the wild west here for reference. I'm old enough to have been fucked by the differences between gawk and awk.

Macha2y ago

ls does not have a consistent interface beyond the basics. And honestly, for the "portable subset", you may not even realise that ls is aliased to exa or lsd or whatever. This is why on why of my systems I'm sitting at right now, (MacOS) ls --help reports "unrecognized option `--help`" and on the other (GNU) ls reports a list of options so long that the entire alphabet is accounted for in both lower and upper case.

baz00OP2y ago

--help doesn't do anything functional so that's not a good example.

Macha2y ago

-R, --group-directories first are some notable, frequent options I use on GNU ls that are missing from MacOS ls. Along with every "long" option, which I like to prefer in scripts to make them more self documenting.

exa actually does support both, so in a way it's more compatible with my usage of (GNU) ls than (MacOS) ls is.

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gpm2y ago

ls (specifically the version used on just about every linux distro) had a huge breaking change in 2016, so this is objectively false.

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/quotes.html

baz00OP2y ago

I refer to my comment made before this about GNU being the wild west https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419333

drivers992y ago

They made the change only take effect outputting directly to a tty, so it won't break scripts. This is similar to how multi-column output and color output work.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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cmrdporcupine2y ago

Tell me that you don't/haven't worked across a variety of Unix*en without telling me that you haven't...

Homogeneity has never been the name of the game in Unix culture, I don't understand why people would insist on it now.

I say: Bring on the "modern alternatives". I just installed lsd. I used to keep a shell alias from lsd -> ls for years anyways :-)

baz00OP2y ago

I think you're reading me wrong.

I spent a good deal of time working on SunOS (right back to m68k stuff), Solaris, HP/UX, Linux and FreeBSD over the years and use macOS now and am more than aware of the inconsistencies.

I consider GNU to be a particularly bad variety of the wild west here for reference. I'm old enough to have been fucked by the differences between gawk and awk.

Macha2y ago

baz00OP2y ago

--help doesn't do anything functional so that's not a good example.

Macha2y ago

exa actually does support both, so in a way it's more compatible with my usage of (GNU) ls than (MacOS) ls is.

1 more reply

gpm2y ago

ls (specifically the version used on just about every linux distro) had a huge breaking change in 2016, so this is objectively false.

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/quotes.html

baz00OP2y ago

I refer to my comment made before this about GNU being the wild west https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419333

drivers992y ago

They made the change only take effect outputting directly to a tty, so it won't break scripts. This is similar to how multi-column output and color output work.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse