If someone provides a drop-in solution like there is with exiftool then it will go faster. Without help this is likely going to take more than a year of low time comittment work.

Extract the extended filesystem attribute cleanup into a single NPM package, or C/C++ tool with Node CAPI extension.

Find an existing command tool, perhaps C/C++ or Powershell that cleans Windows extended filesystem attrs.

If possible find a single tool that deals with all the Linux file systems uniformly.

exiftool OPTIONS -tagsFromFile SRCFILE - SRCTAG > DSTTAG. There is probably variation between the Linux filesystems. exiftool (1): Read/write meta info in files - Linux man page exiftool (1) - Linux man page Name exiftool - Read and write meta information in files Synopsis exiftool OPTIONS - TAG.

research the extended filesystem attributes more.

In other words, if newfolder doesnt exist, ExifTool will create it. Investigate if there are any extended filesystem attributes that mdls -c still leaves behind and how to deal with them. ExifTool creates any folders it needs as it executes the command.Or pass multiple files at once to a single process per-CPU core.If possible figure out a way to keep the mdls process alive in a process pool and keep them alive to process multiple files to minimize process overhead, like is done with exiftool.

spin up an extra mdls process to read extended filesystem attributes in the “# exif before” column, then another one with the -c flag to clear them, then another one to populate the “# exif after” column.

Exiftool mac comma nd