The World Is a libferris Filesystem

Listing 1. A Long Listing of a Directory with Explicit Metadata

$ fls -l \
--show-ea=size-human-readable,width,height,name
4.5k    48      46      emacs.png
1.9k    48      48      gnome-warning.png
3.2k    48      48      gnome-xterm.png
2.5k    48      48      gtkvim.png

Listing 2. Asking libferris itself to determine which EAs are of interest for the current directory and producing an XML document as output.

$ fls -0 --xml
<ferrisls>
<ferrisls url="file:///tmp/lj"  name="lj"  >
 <context  size-human-readable="4.5k"
  protection-ls="-rw-r-----"
  mtime-display="05 Dec  4 23:39"
  name="emacs.png"  width="48"  height="46"  />
 ...
</ferrisls>
</ferrisls>

Listing 3. Sorting Your Output

$ fls --show-ea=width,height,size,name \
  --ferris-sort='(:#:height)(:V:name)'
48      48      1968    gnome-warning.png
48      48      3253    gnome-xterm.png
48      48      2550    gtkvim.png
48      46      4589    emacs.png
48      46      4589    foo3.png
48      46      4589    foo20.png

Listing 4. Initial Exploration of XML as a Filesystem

$ cat example.xml
<root>
  <file1 size="200" />
  <file2 interesting="yes" />
  <file3>filesystems rock
</file3>
</root>

$ fls -0 ./example.xml/root
file1
file2
file3

$ fls -d --show-ea=name,interesting \
   ./example.xml/root/file2
file2   yes

$ fcat example.xml/root/file3
filesystems rock

Listing 5. Changing an XML File through Its Filesystem

$ echo "VIRTUAL filesystems rock more" | \
  ferris-redirect -T ./example.xml/root/file3

$ echo "a new way" | \
  ferris-redirect ./example.xml/root/file4

$ ferrisrm ./example.xml/root/file2

$ ftouch ./example.xml/root/touched

$ cat example.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"
   standalone="no" ?>
<root>
  <file1 size="200"/>

  <file3>VIRTUAL filesystems rock more
</file3>
  <file4>a new way
</file4>

  <touched/>

</root>

Listing 6. OpenOffice.org Documents Are Filesystems Too

$ fls -lh show-ea=size,name,content \
~/sample-oo-writer.odt/content.xml/ \
office:document-content/office:body/office:text
 0       office:forms
 18      text:p Paragraph number 1
 0       text:p-1
 116     text:p-2 This is the second paragraph ...
 0       text:p-3
 39      text:p-4 And in summary, this is really...
 0       text:p=5
 0       text:sequence-decls