I can try... Specifically, given a command that produces a list of "everything that can be done with the file", how do I cause the (unstructured) text of that list to be piped into a arbitrary other program, in the same way that `grep foo a.txt | bar` causes a list of occurences of 'foo' in a.txt to be piped into arbitrary program bar.
> How do you pipe the output of cp into awk?
$ cp -vT foo/ bar/* | awk '...'As I understood the suggestion re. file actions it is meant as some sort of interactive completion. So if I type the name of an image file and press tap, I am given the suggestions or options about resizing, format conversion etc. Several shells already have interactive completion of file names.
And I think that pattern makes sense from an exploration perspective. If you learn that file name + tab gives suggestions, then a lot of the learning about what the command line can do can be done directly in the command line.
And maybe it could be a command rather than a tab-press. Then it, given a file, prints typical actions/commands/tasks to stdout and then subsequent CLI tools can be used to process that output.
I really don’t see how this is incompatible with existing workflows :-)
Yeah, I was giving a example of a sensible way to design it, not documenting something that already exists; sorry if that wasn't clear.
> And maybe it could be a command [like `file -u FILE`] rather than a tab-press. Then it, given a file, prints typical actions/commands/tasks to stdout and then subsequent CLI tools can be used to process that output.
Pretty much that, yes.
> I also find it a bit hilarious that the example lists `ed` as the editor of choice.
I don't think unix had TECO as a standard utility, so I went with what was available.