>there's the fact that the date modified column format depends on how long in the past it was modified! Not if you do the sane thing and use the -T option. Of

>there's the fact that the date modified column format depends on how long in the past it was modified! Not if you do the sane thing and use the -T option. Of course that requires the user to read another huge man page to find out that such an option exists. I think you have failed to understand the kind of alternative people are proposing. Nobody is saying that the current ls sorting flags should be removed and replaced by passing the output of the current ls command to sort. That would be broken and difficult to use for all the usual reasons that passing around unstructured text is broken and difficult. The idea is passing more structured data between processes so that the problem you describe could never even happen. What you describe is actually the type of issue people want to solve (but in the general case, not just for ls). Formatting data for humans to read and formatting data for machines to read are different problems. Current unix cli tools have to attempt to do both, which often means doing neither well. If you are lucky there are at least some flags you can use to make the output more structured. If you are unlucky the command magically reformats the output based on the type of device it's printing to.