I know.. It's almost like the people who came up with these ideas 40 years ago didn't think of everything. There are plenty of ways to do things better with ba

I know.. It's almost like the people who came up with these ideas 40 years ago didn't think of everything. There are plenty of ways to do things better with basic text interfaces - a more standardized header format for example. If most tools just output tabbed separated values with a header, or the same thing vertically.. ie.. foo bar baz 1 2 3 4 5 6 or foo 1 4 bar 2 5 baz 3 6 It would have been a lot easier to write more "universal" tools that worked with this data. Or at least more tools like 'ifdata' that is part of moreutils. $ ifdata -pa wlan0 192.168.1.2 Instead of the mess people come up with to parse ifconfig output. Bryan Cantrill even said in a presentation something like that it should be "Write programs to handle json text streams, because that is a universal interface" these days.