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Comment by ohgodplsno | Hacker News Reader

pneumatic drill: 8 years, dead

the sharp stick of metal my dad gave me: 38 years and counting

long live the sharp stick of metal ?

What a terrible take. Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists. It's getting a few maintenance commits here and there, and in the mean time, it's feature done. It won't evolve anymore. Just like how exa will keep existing, and won't evolve anymore. Exa also does a hell of a lot more than ls, so will LSD, Eza and others. But keep using the sharp stick of metal if it makes you feel better.

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> Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists.

Why would it be a strong word? Here it is, in src/ls.c: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils

It is then packaged by tens of operating system distributions, who themselves maintain extra patchsets, some of which are then upstreamed.

It is installed and used on millions (billions?) of devices, for 3 decades.

It's a very reliable and trusty "sharp stick of metal" :)

That's GNU coreutils.

Yes, and it includes the "ls" program that this thread discusses.

I like how people are arguing that ls is alive, like there is active work being done on it over 38 years. A Unix tool that does one thing well can be considered finished and sit for years without anything going on. That doesn't mean it's dead. Sure, maybe people want fancy new stuff, but again, doesn't mean dead. If it had security problems for years, then one could argue that it's dangerous for it not to be updated and if it isn't, then proclaim it dead so people will move to something safer, but this trend to call something dead because it isn't in rust and doesn't have colors and git awareness? Meh

Exactly! ls is alive, and just exists, mostly. The commits done on it are extremely minor changes to save up 0.0001% of performance and because the APIs it was using are sometimes deprecated. And that's fine!

However, when a new project arrives and does more, suddenly it's dogshit because it's stopped evolving despite doing infinitely more than ls.

Unixheads have a weird inferiority complex when it comes to anything not in coreutils.

coreutils is GNU. GNU is not unix. BSD utilities in base have far more utilities than coreutils.

Also, learn to use ls -F under an alias. You get the 99% of the functionality with very little.

ls is very actively maintained http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/log/

Good for you if you accept that your tools might get rug-pulled from you any time. I don't.

Is exa gone ? Can you not download exa anymore ? Are the binaries deleted from the internet ? Is the source completely overwritten ? Has it been removes from crates.io and from package managers ? Has it suddenly stopped listing files in your folders?

Calling it having your tools rug-pulled from you is, quite frankly, the most moronic thing I've read today.

Not yet.

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