Most Linux users type ls -la dozens of times a day without exploring what the command can do. But beyond listing files, ls offers several useful options for sorting files by version, displaying file creation time, identifying file types, and producing output that is safer to use in scripts.
If you work with Linux servers, ls is probably one of the first commands you run after logging in. For most users, the command stops at ls -l or ls -la.
That is usually enough until you need to find the newest release archive in a directory full of versioned files, check when a configuration file was created, or pass filenames to a script without breaking on spaces or special characters.
The good news is that GNU ls, included in GNU coreutils, already provides options for handling these tasks. In many cases, you don’t need to combine it with sort, awk, or stat to get the information you need.