As much as I agree that the tooling is, object-based tools would be much nicer.
for i in `ls`; do echo $i.size; done; ls -la | awk '{print $5}'But yeah, the solution he proposed was to start combining different information namespaces (such as the "metadata" namespace that you are alluding to) into the filesystem namespace, as well as allowing for the filesystem to be pluggable so people could write databases that could be searched with the filesystem.
So your example would look like
for i in "$(ls)"; do echo $i/..../size; done
echo 1000 | tee */..../uid
I'd like to ensure my tools are all speaking a format which is too simple to ever fail.
stat -c "%s %n" * for i in *; do du -bs "$i"; done > for i in *; do du -bs "$i"; done
du: illegal option -- b
usage: du [-H | -L | -P] [-a | -s | -d depth] [-c] [-h | -k | -m | -g] [-x] [-I mask] [file …]
Omg