[kazinator]

Calling an external too to list files is an anti-pattern; every programming language or shell language should have that built-in, so it's just doing that via the OS API (opendir/readdir/closedir).

The POSIX shell has that in the form of globbing. That only gives you names, and has quirks that are only adequately worked around with Bash options.

The fix is to use some real programming language for complex work.

I made a language for myself in this space, geared toward C and Unix people who are willing to try Lisp: TXR.

  1> (stat "/usr/share/dict/words")
  #S(stat dev 2306 ino 884986 mode 33188 nlink 1 uid 0 gid 0 rdev 0 size 931708
          blksize 4096 blocks 1832 atime 1667315034 atime-nsec 0 mtime 1238396423
          mtime-nsec 0 ctime 1405615444 ctime-nsec 0 path "/usr/share/dict/words")
  2> (flow "/usr/share/dict/words"
            stat
            [callf list .path .size])
  ("/usr/share/dict/words" 931708)
  3> (flow "/usr/share/dict/words"
            stat
            [callf list .path .size [chain .uid getpwuid .name]])
  ("/usr/share/dict/words" 931708 "root")