How would you make 'sort' do all the things that 'ls' can easily do?
How do you sort a multi-column output by 3rd column?. You have to write some scripts for that.
How do you sort a multi-column output by 3rd column?. You have to write some scripts for that.
What sort option puts 1.0K, 1.0M, and 1.0G in the right order?
Someone pointed out that ls is really doing three things - listing files, sorting them and displaying them. That seems fairly accurate, and indeed it's convenient that it does.
But it's not 'doing one thing'. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad (as I just said, it's convenient), but it's not hardline Unix-way purity.
For practical reasons like those you raise, it makes sense for ls to handle its own sorting rather than leave it to the sort command, just as it handles its own formatting rather than let the user manage it. But those features _are_ something other than just reporting file listings, whatever the motivation for the feature creep. This convenient flexibility makes ls less single-task, less Unix-adherent but more generally useful on its own.
Both of which wouldn't be the job of a "do one thing and do it well" `ls`. That one would display dates as a UNIX timestamp and sizes as bytes. Aside from that, surely if ls can format information it's possible to reverse that formatting.
Here's another thought I had about the old school unix way. Old school unix didn't have symlinks. The purpose of the filesystem is to store files, right? If you want aliases, then you should keep them in a file like /etc/symlinks. Or ~/.symlinks, then every user can have their own aliases. That's the real unix way, right? Let's not take the minimalism to absurd extremes.