What if we added json output mode to all shell commands? Or at least make some wrappers that parse their unstructured text output into json.
We would be able to use standard pipelines and jq to filter/query outputs, without any custom shells.
Just imagine:
ifconfig --json | jq '.[] | [.interface, .inet] | @tsv'You're not the first person to think of that. See Juniper's libxo: https://github.com/Juniper/libxo
It's integrated into a lot of FreeBSD's command line tooling, and is very useful, when it's available.