One of the problems with this that probably occurs to everyone is that there are many more actions you can do with a file than there are files in a typical directory. So you might say > how file, and it might return 1000 things you can do with it.

To answer my own objection, > how (or whatever the tool is called), or just the object itself as in the author's example, could display categorized actions, or offer a way to navigate submenus, or it could limit initial output to things that a non-superuser would want to do and offer additional options for superusers to browse more advanced options (or assume they know what other tools exist and use them directly).