Having written a lot of shell scripts, the single greatest thing I've ever experienced is shell-friendly outputs.

For example, consider if ls had a "--shell" option that output each entry as a single line of shell-quoted variables safe for eval:

    # cd /usr/share/dict
    # ls --shell words
    path="/usr/share/dict" file="words" user="root" group="root" size=985084 ...

Then all sorts of things become easy.

    # eval $(ls --shell words); echo "$size" "$file"

This nushell doesn't really change anything important about this biggest scripting problem. You're still parsing human readable output and it's still dependent on particular versions and options passed.

If I had a genie wish of nushell being installed everywhere or even just coreutils having a --shell option I'd take the latter any day.

jc [0] is dedicated to providing this externally for common commands, but I agree that it would be better if command authors built it in as an option. It would make shell scripts shorter, more readable, and less buggy.

[0] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc