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But column-oriented output is still structured and tools like AWK are meant to be a "programmable filter" on it. Reading or outputting deeply nested structures
by bluetomcat 10y ago
But column-oriented output is still structured and tools like AWK are meant to be a "programmable filter" on it. Reading or outputting deeply nested structures like JSON or S-exps would make it less practical to pipe programs together and instead have big "monolithic filters" with lots of options.
- pwdisswordfish 10y agoThat just illustrates the limitations of the pipe abstraction, as something only able to send sequentially-read unstructured data. Also, jq, jshon and similar tools are a thing.
- fnj 10y agoParsing columns of text with awk or any other text tools is vexingly problematic. How do you even define "column"? What if columns contain whitespace? How do you differentiate that from the whitespace between columns?