> Hmm, this is dladm, so my parser needs to have IFS='|', whilea > later in my script the one that uses zoneadm needs IFS=: and > this other place needs eval (but has namespace issues) - except > on Fridays when the user has a locale != "C" ... > > You are right - expecting a common set of code is probably not > worthwhile, but having a common grammar/format (IMO) still is.
I think it's worthwhile too, but this case is considerably more modest in its goals: we simply want dladm to be easy to parse in the shell and other simple-minded traditional Unix utilities. We believe the simple approach we're proposing with this case are generally applicable to future utilities and thus would others inventing paresable output modes that need to be shell-friendly to follow the same appraoch. We also expect that future networking CLIs we're working on (flowadm, ipmpstat, lbadm, ...) will look quite similar, but that's as far as we're comfortable going given both the political and technical obstacles (not just in terms of legacy code, but in terms of differing requirements) to building a truly uniform solution. -- meem
