Peter Memishian writes: > > 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.
For what it's worth, the colon-separated (and escaped) output method of resolving this problem is what I did for zoneadm in PSARC 2006/387 and CR 6431731, and for exactly the same reasons. There's at least some precedent here. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
