One advantage: `ls -i` gives you the file's inode in a POSIX portable way. If you glob and then look it up individually for each file, you'll need to be aware o

One advantage: `ls -i` gives you the file's inode in a POSIX portable way. If you glob and then look it up individually for each file, you'll need to be aware of which tool (and whether it's GNU or BSD in origin) you use on which platform. In general yes globbing is better for iterating through files. But parsing `ls` doesn't necessarily mean the author doesn't know shell. It might mean they know it well enough to use the tools that are made available to them.