Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 22:02:20 -0700 From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org> To: Chris H <bsd-lists@bsdforge.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Erik Cederstrand <erik+lists@cederstrand.dk> Subject: Re: [GSoC] Machine readable output from userland utilities Message-ID: <537C335C.3060105@mu.org> In-Reply-To: <f17ef374463361cc4d42009f7b418f67.authenticated@ultimatedns.net> References: <49E9736E-AD14-4647-8B15-30603D01360C@mail.bg> <91FE2526-F21C-42AB-BECB-058DBA975A9E@cederstrand.dk> <537C2993.1060206@mu.org> <f17ef374463361cc4d42009f7b418f67.authenticated@ultimatedns.net>
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On 5/20/14, 9:58 PM, Chris H wrote: >> >> Basically the idea would be to write a simple tool that is able to >> extract using an xpath or json selector. >> >> Example (very rough code): >> >> ifconfig --output xml | selector --format xml --path /name --path >> /name/etheraddr | \ >> while read name ether ; do >> echo "Interface $name has hardware address $ether" ; >> done >> >> In all seriousness though, the real target is people writing higher >> level languages (than shell) on top of FreeBSD. Perhaps python or ruby >> spawning a utility and then that utility making the output easy to read. >> >> One thing to note is that the output should not just be formatted but >> normalized as well. The fact that "uptime" can emit 15 different >> formats for the uptime string is terrible for people coding on top of >> the base utils, the json/xml/other output should be decided on some form >> of normalized data likely in seconds + microseconds or something, but >> anything truly machine readable is better than the current output when >> popen'd by a webapp. >> >> -Alfred > Greetings, all. > I may be getting into this thread a bit late in the game. But if I > understand the gist of this correctly; isn't all this pretty much what > Perl was intended for? > > All the best. I can't tell if you're late or early since the connection is breaking up, but from what I can make out you're stuck in 1997. -Alfred
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