That's another excellent point, by the way... All Unix (and derivative OS utilities) typically pass unstructured raw data to one another via pipes... That's s

That's another excellent point, by the way... All Unix (and derivative OS utilities) typically pass unstructured raw data to one another via pipes... That's sort of a good thing and a bad thing at the same time... It's great for such things as binary files, binary streams, anything binary in nature... But equal-and-oppositely, it's terrible for say, if I wanted to put the output of a 'ls -al', and I wanted to put all of those fields into something like a structured XML or JSON or BSON or what-have-you. I also like your point about FD's for pipes... that's a good idea too. Yes, I could see deadlocks as possible, but then, maybe yet another extra step of engineering/forethought is necessary -- how do we manage locking in those scenarios? Maybe we could create timers that automatically break a deadlock after a certain number of seconds, and/or put the lock explicitly under program control (like the FD's for pipes), etc., etc. Anyway, some fascinating stuff! >"Although I think richer pipelines make sense, structured data will probably come first: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Structured-Data-in-Oil https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Structured-Data-in-Oil" Looks like you've been doing your homework! <g>