the thing with the coreutils is they provide basic core functionality; you dont need bash on your system - `ls` is not bash (and then you still end up with busy

the thing with the coreutils is they provide basic core functionality; you dont need bash on your system - `ls` is not bash (and then you still end up with busybox where json still would not be part of ls). add more utilities to your system to do more complex logic; ive used similar apps to this in the past: https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc there's also using zero terminiated lines in ls with `--zero`; then piping that to a number of apps which also support similar (read,xargs,ect) might also checkout powershell on linux which may suite your needs where instead of string manipulation, everything is a class object