I think they took one step in the right direction, where two more were needed. The UNIX idea of piping text output from one command to the next was fine at the

I think they took one step in the right direction, where two more were needed. The UNIX idea of piping text output from one command to the next was fine at the time, but it means that the downstream command has to parse text. With nushell, you are parsing slightly more structured text. The two steps they could have taken in addition: 1. Instead of generating rows of a table, why not lists of strings? E.g. ("abc", "def", 123) instead of "abc | def | 123". Much easier to deal with in the command receiving this input. 2. And instead of just lists, why not objects? E.g. a process object, a file object, or, if you'd like a list as above. I have implemented this idea: https://github.com/geophile/osh https://github.com/geophile/osh. For example, if you want to find processes in state 'S' with more than 3 descendents, and print the pid and command line of each, sorted by pid: osh ps ^ select 'p: p.state == "S" and len(p.descendents) > 3' ^ f 'p: (p.pid, p.commandline)' ^ sort $ ^ is used to denote piping. ps yields Process objects. Select examines those processes and keeps those with the right characteristics. Then f applies a function, mapping to the the pid and commandline in a list, and then sort sorts the lists, by pid (the first field of each list). $ does output.