scry is an opinionated command-line utility that combines the metadata-focused features of stat with the word-, line-, and paragraph-counting capabilities of wc.
scry differs from its predecessors in that it's written in Rust (btw) and is more
selective about the information it provides than stat and wc. By default,
scry offers less information than stat and more information than wc.
Benchmarks conducted via hyperfine put scry at roughly 1.91x the performance of stat
and roughly 3.11x the performance of wc on small files. (Note that the exact figures vary based on the size of the file, the arguments supplied to hyperfine, etc.)
Because I wanted to learn Rust, don't always want all of the information stat
provides, and occasionally want to be able to view a file's metadata as well as
information about the contents of the file without having to use multiple tools.
Because programming is spellcasting, it sounds cool, and it's the same length as "stat"... until you take the mandatory arguments into consideration. Whoops.
Beats me!
Absolutely! The printing is handled by two println! statements in main.rs; you can
modify them and build from source to get access to other fields. The full list of
available fields, which is similar to those offered by stat, can be found in the
metadata.rs module. (Note that the available data varies by platform.)
scry is a learning project; its features are dictated by my progress through learning Rust, my expectations for a utility of this type, and a certain amount of whimsy.
That said, the following features at least seem interesting:
- the ability to analyze multiple files at once
- a database that can be used to track invocations of scry on a file over time
- more in-depth analysis of a file's contents
These features might never arrive, however, or might be part of a different project.