Like probably dozens of others, I've been idly dreaming about reimplementing coreutils / textutils etc to be able to emit and consume structured records in some

Like probably dozens of others, I've been idly dreaming about reimplementing coreutils / textutils etc to be able to emit and consume structured records in some serialization format. The thing that would make this really useful is a(t least one) global database of serialization formats to be a lingua franca between tools. Designing those formats to be useful cross-platform would be tough, but you could start with a format db that only promises linux compat, and later add bsd, and maybe windows even later. edit: google had something like this internally, the "protodb", a versioned repository of protobuf definitions so that any other tool could consume your tool's output.