Peter Memishian wrote: > > Please explain why using a whitespace character such as tab as the > > delimiter is unworkable. > > Because most shells will consolidate multiple consecutive whitespace > fields into a single field. Blank fields become unworkable. > > > My definition of parsable input means I can write a script like > > this in sh: > > > > dladm -o state,over | while read a b; do > > echo "a=$a,b=$b" > > done > > That works, just set IFS=| > > Is ':' possibly used in the output values?
If not, it seems that there is precedent (in other command output, and file formats) to make ':' preferable to '|'. If will regularly appear in the field values, then it can't work and '|' seems as good as anything else. -Kyle
