It's 2026, you should not be using command prompt (or batch.) In powershell ls is a built in alias to get-childitem and has been for years, and in recent versions of windows you'd have to go out of your way to get a command prompt (you would have to open a powershell terminal and then run cmd.)
On one our linux machine filesystem became strange, probably because somebody mistyped `ls /bin` as `ln /bin`. I think docs say hardlinking folders is impossible or maybe /bin was a symlink.