[GSoC] Machine readable output from userland utilities

[Alfred Perlstein]

On 5/20/14, 9:58 PM, Chris H wrote:
>>
>> Basically the idea would be to write a simple tool that is able to
>> extract using an xpath or json selector.
>>
>> Example (very rough code):
>>
>>    ifconfig --output xml | selector --format xml --path /name --path
>> /name/etheraddr  | \
>>       while read name ether ; do
>>         echo "Interface $name has hardware address $ether" ;
>>       done
>>
>> In all seriousness though, the real target is people writing higher
>> level languages (than shell) on top of FreeBSD.  Perhaps python or ruby
>> spawning a utility and then that utility making the output easy to read.
>>
>> One thing to note is that the output should not just be formatted but
>> normalized as well.  The fact that "uptime" can emit 15 different
>> formats for the uptime string is terrible for people coding on top of
>> the base utils, the json/xml/other output should be decided on some form
>> of normalized data likely in seconds + microseconds or something, but
>> anything truly machine readable is better than the current output when
>> popen'd by a webapp.
>>
>> -Alfred
> Greetings, all.
> I may be getting into this thread a bit late in the game. But if I
> understand the gist of this correctly; isn't all this pretty much what
> Perl was intended for?
>
> All the best.

I can't tell if you're late or early since the connection is breaking 
up, but from what I can make out you're stuck in 1997.

-Alfred