You shouldn't parse the output of ls(1)

Some of these are why I bail for a “real language” in many seemingly simple scenarios. As soon as I care about datetimes, it’s just easier to use stat() and a proper datetime API. I can treat filenames as byte arrays and translate to Unicode or let the language do it for me. In dire circumstances, find … -print0 | xargs -0 second_script is usually my fallback, but that has pitfalls as well. Go has been a blessing there for…

A number of people have commented that they’ve never experienced a filename with `\n`, or other weird characters, in the wild. On the contrary, I’ve seen this many many times, to the point that I’m defensive about how I write scripts, to compensate. In my case, these were files created by some other program that contained a bug, where the filename was accidentally set to something like the file contents, say. These other programs were often written by researchers, rather…

This is the big thing that disappointed and frustrated me after I had spent a bunch of time hacking on Lisp Machines and then switched to Unix: in the Unix world, everything but everything is character strings. On the LispM, when you called 'directory', you'd get back a list of pathname objects. All the system interfaces were like that; it was hardly ever necessary to parse anything -- and when you did have to, it would be in s-expression format…

The article doesn't mention "ls -1" at all, which has served me quite well in various more or less complex scripts over the years.