The flags you talk about are mostly about the presentation of the output. The, shall we say, "business logic" of `ls` is still pretty bare-bones. That could be

The flags you talk about are mostly about the presentation of the output. The, shall we say, "business logic" of `ls` is still pretty bare-bones. That could be one way to draw a line. Also, I think these presentation/formatting flags are a consequence of the Unix shell "everything-is-text" paradigm. In Powershell, where you pass around structured data rather than text, typically you handle presentation just by piping into the appropriate cmdlet.