[GSoC] Machine readable output from userland utilities

[Chris H]

>
> 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.
LOL. That's good. :)
I'm clearly missing something -- no, not the 21st century. ;)
But just for the record; I meant nothing negative by my assertion.
It just /seemed/ like Perl would/could be capable.

--Chris
>
> -Alfred
>
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