Thank you so much for the great explanation and taking the time to reply to my post! That is most certainly a more elegant solution!

The du command does exactly what I and even the post author in the linked post to the course intended to do via a script! Though, I can imagine that the author just wanted to provide a quick example script for usage in the prompt.

awk seems pretty interesting. Going a bit off-topic:

Awk is a programming language that makes it possible to handle [simple, mechanical data manipulation] tasks with very short programs, often only one or two lines long. An awk program is a sequence of patterns and actions that tell what to look for in the input data and what to do when it’s found (p. iii).¹

Probably more needed in 1988 than today (due to fewer alternatives being available) it seems to still have good use cases. Also, there is a second edition in the works, even after 35 years! Last note: I know Brian Kernighan from his appearances on Computerphile 😁 .

¹Aho, A. V., Kernighan, B. W., & Weinberger, P. J. (1988). The AWK programming language. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

People have already tried to explain the idea behind Mastodon. If you are also looking for an overview of how Mastodon “works”, please have a look at https://fedi.tips/.