> So if it can be any arbitrary text stream, how do they ensure composibility? You got the composability thing wrong. The tools are composable because you feed

> So if it can be any arbitrary text stream, how do they ensure composibility? You got the composability thing wrong. The tools are composable because you feed them on STDIN or in command line arguments. You still need to do plenty of work to convert one format to another, and that's what awk, grep, sed, and other tools are for. The only two common (and just common, not universal) things are to split fields on whitespaces and to split records/entries on newline.