Hi Alejandro,

On Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:42:24 +0200
Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]> wrote:

> Experimentally, ls(1) and dir(1) seem to be exactly the same.  I'd
> like to document dir(1) with a short page saying that it's equivalent
> to ls(1).  Is this correct, or is there any subtle difference?

From https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#User-Interfaces :

  For example, we provide a dir program much like ls except that its
  default output format is always multi-column format.

That's where I learnt about `dir`, but similar is said in `info dir`.
You can confirm this by comparing the output of `dir|cat` vs `ls|cat`.

I think to know these kinds of differences you'd need to refer to GNU
texinfo pages (short of just reading the source). After all, the GNU
project treats them as the primary documentation.

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