Right, globs are syntactic sugar on top of readdir. Definitely use them when you are in a shell. But in general the solution is to call readdir, or some language facility built directly on top of it. Calling ls and asking it for JSON is the stupid way to do things.
It doesn't require trying to organize a small revolution across dozens of GNU tools, many authors, and numerous distros...?
I'd love to see standard JSON output across these tools. I just don't see a realistic way to get that to happen in my lifetime.
Maybe a unified parsing layer is more realistic, like an open source command output to JSON framework that would automatically identify the command variant you're running based on its version and your shell settings, parse the output for you, and format it in a standard JSON schema? Even that would be a huge undertaking though.
There are a lot, LOT of command variants out there. It's one thing to tweak the output to make it parseable for your one-off script on your specific machine. Not so easy to make it reusable across the entire *nix world.
With regards to parted, if you only want to query for information, there is "partx" whose output was purposefully designed to be parsed. I have good experiences with it.
