[hyperpape]

Also there's a question about whether you can properly deal with option hell. Parsing every possible output of ls reliably in the face of malicious filenames sounds...fun.

Edit: It's really impossible to avoid edge cases. Take find: you can't parse it, because it's just a list of filenames separated by \n. But filenames can contain just about any character. How do you handle /home/bar\n/tmp?

Maybe you just ignore pathological input, but now you're regressing towards the state of bash.

[xiaq]

Option hell is indeed a problem.

The problem with `find` happens to have a solution (-print0). However it is a PITA in deal with \0-separated strings in traditional shells, unless you pipe it to another command that happens to recognize \0-separated strings.

With elvish you can parse the \0-separated strings outputted by `find ... -print0` into a genuine list - not lines (which are \n-separated strings) or \0-separated strings, but real lists that support indexing, iteration, etc. and there is absolutely no chance that two consequent items will run together or one item will be treated as two. Imagine how fantastic it is to deal with that :)