Show HN: Bashfs – Run commands as your filesystem

We've come so far as a society, it's amazing.

I appreciate the attempt to help, but I disagree.

The README "addresses" a question of "why?". But because that's not a real answer, it's not a valid response to "but really why?"

The actual "why" is the author did it for fun, there's basically no purpose to it. I can try to explain it though:

Interacting with file systems can be generally summed up in a handful of basic operations. Two of the most important operations are open, which asks the filesystem if it has a file of a given name, and read, which reads the contents of that file. FUSE is a Linux wrapper for writing virtual file systems by implementing these basic operations. Here open, instead of taking a filename, is telling the program what command to run and read, instead of returning the contents of a file is returning the output of the command.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't get it.

I can understand if you want to do something wacky with FUSE. Something like mounting a PostScript or JSON file, and using the filesystem interface to observe and modify the contents. Or something else that is vaguely hierarchical.

I just didn't see any "reasonable" mapping for running a series of commands to a filesystem.

There's a lot of 'Why?'s here, what I feel from this is that the FS can now be a turing-complete system. This will allow to extend the 'Everything is a file' concept in UNIX (whether it's good or bad is a different question;) to computation.

With BashFS, computation & interaction with other programs is now a file; we can 'open' a appropriate file instead of managing subprocesses anymore!

This (at least to me) blur the difference between UNIX (where everything should be a file) and LispMachines (where everything is a Lisp object).