i was thinking of of rearranging stat(1)'s source code a little so
that other programs could include the formatting code with very little
difficulty.

one such candidate would be find(1), so that you could do things like:

	find . -type f -stat "%m %N" | sort -n | tail -5

for example, and find the five newest files under a given directory.
there would, of course, be a -stat0 operator, and these would satisfy
the "print something by default" requirement that find asserts.

it's terribly non-standard, of course, but it might also terribly
useful.

comments?  opinions?  criticisms?  flames?

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