"text scraping seems barbaric by comparison" "can't use all that power for much, since the pool of PS-compatible tools and utilities is much shallower than it

"text scraping seems barbaric by comparison" "can't use all that power for much, since the pool of PS-compatible tools and utilities is much shallower than it is for Unix shells" The explanations are obvious though... aren't they. Text might be barbaric, but every programming language in the world makes sending text to stdout dead easy. The unix shell utilities are smart to support that case.