> PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data.
CLI programs should operate on text. If you want to parse and format it, do so, but the default output mode should be plain text, so that I can pipe it into grep or awk without a second thought.
I am continuously irritated that the AWS CLI defaults to outputting in JSON. No one (I hope…) is using that tool in programs; that’s what boto3 and its ilk are for. But if humans are reading it, why default to something that they’re almost certainly going to be piping into jq if only for the formatting help?
> PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data.
CLI programs should operate on text. If you want to parse and format it, do so, but the default output mode should be plain text, so that I can pipe it into grep or awk without a second thought.
I am continuously irritated that the AWS CLI defaults to outputting in JSON. No one (I hope…) is using that tool in programs; that’s what boto3 and its ilk are for. But if humans are reading it, why default to something that they’re almost certainly going to be piping into jq if only for the formatting help?