Exa – a modern replacement for ls

the.exa.website

2 points·gozzoo··2 comments

Here are the advantages of ls

1. It's already on my system. No installation necessary.

2. It's on EVERYBODY's system. No matter what Unix-based terminal I go up to, I know it has ls.

3. I know how ls works. I can focus my time on solving business problems rather than learning a variation of a tool I've been using for 30 years.

ls is also defined by POSIX, including the format of output so you can reliably parse out metadata. IIRC there's no other well-defined way to query, e.g., the size of a file. The stat(1) command is non-portable, not always available, and the GNU and BSD versions don't even pretend to behave similarly in terms of the option flags or format specifiers.

I'd have more interest in these new utilities if they actually paid some attention to these sorts of details. It would be trivial to both implement POSIX semantics as well as provide all the fancy behaviors you'd want as an extension, especially because POSIX behavior is often only defined for specific situations (i.e. if a particular flag is specified and printing to a pipe or from a non-interactive session).

But when utilities don't bother implementing basic POSIX behavior it tells me that they don't actually understand all the reasons for particular behaviors. You can't fix something if you don't understand what the problems are. Simply declaring something as legacy and non-sensical doesn't cut it.

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