How to do it...

Let's open meta.js, and begin by loading the modules we'll be using:

const fs = require('fs') 
const path = require('path') 
const tableaux = require('tableaux') 

Next we'll initialize tableaux with some table headers, which in turn will supply a write function which we'll be using shortly:

const write = tableaux( 
  {name: 'Name', size: 20}, 
  {name: 'Created', size: 30}, 
  {name: 'DeviceId', size: 10}, 
  {name: 'Mode', size: 8}, 
  {name: 'Lnks', size: 4}, 
  {name: 'Size', size:  6} 
) 

Now let's sketch out a print function:

function print(dir) { 
  fs.readdirSync(dir) 
    .map((file) => ({file, dir})) 
    .map(toMeta) 
    .forEach(output) 
  write.newline() 
} 

The print function won't work yet, not until we define the toMeta and output functions.

The toMeta function is going to take an object with a file property, stat the file in order to obtain information about it, and then return that data, like so:

function toMeta({file, dir}) { 
  const stats = fs.statSync(path.join(dir, file)) 
  var {birthtime, ino, mode, nlink, size} = stats 
  birthtime = birthtime.toUTCString() 
  mode = mode.toString(8) 
  size += 'B' 
  return { 
    file, 
    dir, 
    info: [birthtime, ino, mode, nlink, size], 
    isDir: stats.isDirectory() 
  } 
} 

The output function is going to output the information supplied by toMeta, and in cases where a given entity is a directory, it will query and output a summary of the directory contents. Our output functions look like the following:

function output({file, dir, info, isDir}) { 
  write(file, ...info) 
  if (!isDir) { return } 
  const p = path.join(dir, file) 
  write.arrow() 
  fs.readdirSync(p).forEach((f) => { 
    const stats = fs.statSync(path.join(p, f)) 
    const style = stats.isDirectory() ? 'bold' : 'dim' 
    write[style](f) 
  }) 
  write.newline() 
} 

Finally, we can call the print function:

print(process.argv[2] || '.') 

Now let's run our program. Assuming our current working directory is the fetching-meta-data folder, we should be able to successfully run the following:

$ node meta.js my-folder 

Our program output should look similar to the following screenshot: