ls is the archetypical example of unix gone wrong, and I think this was already widely discussed (and joked) about in early 90s (iirc unix haters had something

ls is the archetypical example of unix gone wrong, and I think this was already widely discussed (and joked) about in early 90s (iirc unix haters had something about that). It should be just simple wrapper for readdir, but it grew into sprawling mess when it learned to stat the files too, which snowballed ls to have gazillion ways to handle all sorts of metadata