I had to write a one-liner to deal with that on Mac OS 10.4 -- had to detect if a user had placed anything on their Desktop, which had a custom folder icon beca

I had to write a one-liner to deal with that on Mac OS 10.4 -- had to detect if a user had placed anything on their Desktop, which had a custom folder icon because it was actually a cross-filesystem symlink: desktop=$(test -z $(ls -A1 /Volumes/Documents/Desktop | \ sed -e '/^.DS_Store$/d' -e '/^Icon^M$/d')) The ^M was a literal CR, which would get munged by all my usual editors except vim. I'm sure there's some sturdier way to escape it... I remember choosing to use ls intentionally, but not what sucked about the alternatives.