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Isn’t that part of the Unix Way? Not expecting it not to break, but building tools that depend on the undocumented text output of other tools that.
by WalterGR 8y ago
Isn’t that part of the Unix Way?
Not expecting it not to break, but building tools that depend on the undocumented text output of other tools that.
- fwip 8y agoMost Unix tools have well-documented output.
- WalterGR 8y agoWhat do you mean by Unix tools, and what do you mean by well-documented? Hypothetical example: can I read only the man pages of GNU’s and all BSD’s `ls`es and from that write a cross-platform tool that parses the output of all of them?
- fwip 8y agoCheck out the section "stdout" of the POSIX standard here: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ls.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ls...