I did not mean it’s a trick users applied, I meant that the developers of the 1541 DOS implemented this very trick. You load a textual representation of the dir

I did not mean it’s a trick users applied, I meant that the developers of the 1541 DOS implemented this very trick. You load a textual representation of the directory into memory as a BAISC program, that’s pretty funky. And it was precisely done because the straightforward way, which would have been something like opening a sequential channel with a dedicated directory listing command and reading out from it, would have been immensely awkward under BASIC 2.0. Hence the magic “$” program.