On 14/02/15 21:51, Pádraig Brady wrote: > On 14/02/15 21:34, Bernhard Voelker wrote: >> On 02/09/2015 10:27 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote: >>> I'll look about adding placeholders so that who -a is processable. >> >> I'm not so enthusiastic about this - I mean changing the default format. >> What about adding an option like --output=LIST instead, with LINE being >> a comma-separated list of 'name', 'line', 'idle', 'pid', etc.? > > That would be a bit overkill for who I think. > The issue is only with who -a, and solaris at least has placeholders > for name in that case. You could only parse the existing output > in a fixed offset manner, which adding a placeholder wouldn't impact. > So I'm 60:40 for changing this, and 60:40 for just adding placeholders.
I forgot to say why I didn't do this in the last release. I noticed that who -a wouldn't be generally processable due to the variable number of fields introduced with translations. Also the number/format of fields would be quite consistent between each class (who -u, who -d, etc.), and processing across all classes (who -a) would not generally be useful. Given Assaf's case was already handled with: LC_ALL=C who -u | sort -b -k6,6 I didn't think it worth changing the output format. Pádraig.
