ls
Shares rank 42 of 86 privilege escalation tools by recommenders
Standard Unix file lister, stable and complete for everyday use. The most common caveat is its many cryptic flags, which feel awkward outside routine tasks.
Standard Unix file lister, stable and complete for everyday use. The most common caveat is its many cryptic flags, which feel awkward outside routine tasks.
14 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 57%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Stable, predictable, complete Unix tool
“It's very hard to argue against the stoic determinism of an `ls` call.”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI” “well established and solid unix toolchain”
Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Good Tools Are Invisible” “ls, for example, is pretty much complete”
Comment from 31 May 2026 in “Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software – Rsync” Fast and easy in daily use
“now moved everything to just rg+fd+cd+ls, much faster, easier, etc.”
Comment from 4 Apr 2026 in “We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant” “'ls' and the like are fine once you've used them a few times”
Comment from 16 Oct 2026 in “Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Cryptic, flag-heavy options
“Many of the parameters for ls are cryptic, making it awkward to use for anything other than routine tasks”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “The Pleasures of Poor Product Design” “ls has a lot of flags for sorting behavior”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “The Unix Pipe Card Game”
Other privilege escalation tools people recommend
The four most recommended other privilege escalation tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 86 privilege escalation tools, rankedWhat people said
13 of the 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“ls relies on whitespace to delimit columns and those characters can also exist in filenames”
“'ls' and the like are fine once you've used them a few times”
“well established and solid unix toolchain”
“They still work exactly the same, and now even my agents can do it.”
“ls, for example, is pretty much complete”
“now moved everything to just rg+fd+cd+ls, much faster, easier, etc.”
“Many of the parameters for ls are cryptic, making it awkward to use for anything other than routine tasks”
“It's very hard to argue against the stoic determinism of an `ls` call.”
“I don't think it knew when to stop.”
“has --color=always|auto|never which covers most use cases”
“the default way is utterly unsafe”
“ls has a lot of flags for sorting behavior”
“BSD ls(1) is not able to list dirs first.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.