As a "Today I Learned" moment, I'll tell about the dir command.
For some reason I woke up this morning with a Why do we have dir
question. I always thought it is a matter of compatibility with something,
but I never really investigated.
I found this answer quite useful.
A quite interesting thing is that it handles newlines in files correctly, which is definitely problematic under bash!
dacav@lolcalhost:tmp.M8h8Ku4WuF$ touch $'test\nlol'
dacav@lolcalhost:tmp.M8h8Ku4WuF$ ls
'test'$'\n''lol'
dacav@lolcalhost:tmp.M8h8Ku4WuF$ dir
test\nlol
dacav@lolcalhost:tmp.M8h8Ku4WuF$ for i in $(ls); do echo $i; done
test
lol
dacav@lolcalhost:tmp.M8h8Ku4WuF$ for i in $(dir); do echo $i; done
test\nlol
I'm not sure it can be used to make it right (it is probably plain impossible, but it might be helpful.