Lots of core unix tools seem to be really terrible for processing in pipelines. E.g. output from ls or ps has all sorts of pitfalls if you want to process, filter or iterate over it. Are there versions of these that generate more structured data, like JSON? I love the _idea_ of simple specialised commands that compose well, but parsing structured data with cut, sed and awk is just a garbage experience.
@nettles yes but it is specific to FreeBSD world. Juniper invested heavily in this. It's called libxo and it's an absolute nightmare to integrate into these old unix tools for various reasons.
However, it does give us some fun stuff like this:
@nettles@feld Libxo gets a lot of flack but I’m really surprised it never caught on in the Linux world. It’s pretty ideal if you are building an appliance. I suspect it’s a bit of NIH syndrome…maybe if it was written in rust 😁
@pete_wright@nettles my understanding is that you have to splat code all over the codebase wherever any strings would be assembled/printed and it gets really ugly and painful to maintain