Fetching metadata

Reading directory listings, fetching permissions, and getting the time creation and modification. These are all essential pieces of the filesystem tool kit.

Note

fs and POSIXMost of the fs module methods are light wrappers around POSIX operations (with shims for Windows), so many of the concepts and names should be similar if we've indulged in any system programming or even shell scripting.

In this recipe, we're going to write a CLI tool that supplies in-depth information files and directories for a given path.

Getting ready

To get started, let's create a new folder called fetching-meta-data, containing a file called meta.js:

$ mkdir fetching-meta-data 
$ cd fetching-meta-data 
$ touch meta.js

Now let's use npm to create package.json file:

$ npm init -y

We're going to display tabulated and styled metadata in the terminal; instead of manually writing ANSI codes and tabulating code, we'll simply be using the third-party tableaux module.

We can install it like so:

$ npm install --save...