Because ls -l is long format, meant for human readable instead of machine readable. It might be ls -s is suffice. Instead of parsing ls you may be better off w

Because ls -l is long format, meant for human readable instead of machine readable. It might be ls -s is suffice. Instead of parsing ls you may be better off with find or the quick Rust equivalent fd. Instead of awk you can use sed or cut + tr + grep (but I find awk easier to use awk). Nice tools to finish it off are sort and uniq. Though I suppose nowadays everything becomes json.