"crazy hard-core shit" This is the problem. When basic understanding of a system (e.g. I/O) is viewed as "crazy hard-core shit" we are in trouble. You do not

"crazy hard-core shit" This is the problem. When basic understanding of a system (e.g. I/O) is viewed as "crazy hard-core shit" we are in trouble. You do not even need ls in today's UNIX. Globbing, printf, echo and stat can do it all. And if necessary it's easy for the user to write her own custom utilities for displaying file or directory information from the stat struct as long as she is provided with good documentation for the standard C functions. If you don't know how to do these things then you need to learn. And I say that as a dumb end user who can do things in UNIX that apparently most programmers of today cannot or will not because it's "too hard". To me, learning all these high level scripting languages is crazy hard core shit. It would take me forever. They are large and complex. Meanwhile I can do things the short, simple way. And learn about "crazy hard-core shit" like basic I/O at the same time.