What are you on about? I can't think of one Unix command that manipulates structured data and doesn't offer a delimiter option. Furthermore the entire point (if

What are you on about? I can't think of one Unix command that manipulates structured data and doesn't offer a delimiter option. Furthermore the entire point (if you take a moment to think about it) of pipelines is, instead of all commands supporting your preferred delimiter, you need one command to translate (I don't know perhaps something named tr? ) in the pipeline to deal with such limitations. Do you seriously think non-whitespace separated structured records is a novel idea which the simpler times of Unix didn't have to deal with? Have you looked at the passwd file? /rant