I think you're mistaking text-with-structured data for structured data itself.
Because unix shell is irrevocably text-oriented, kludging in something like JSON is basically the best that can be done when you start to want to do structured operations on structured data. (I'm sympathetic to your point about the AWS CLI tools doing JSON by default though--that just sounds like bad design.)
Being text-oriented imposes drastic limits on composability. Because there is no structure, every element of a pipeline needs to do its own parsing of the input data. This leads to brittle pipelines where every element is tightly coupled to its input's textual representation.
As an exercise, try to write a pipeline that sorts podman images by size without removing the column headers[0]:
$ podman image ls --all
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
docker.io/prom/prometheus latest 937690d77350 2 months ago 367 MB
quay.io/keycloak/keycloak latest da9433c9fac3 2 months ago 466 MB
registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox 43 a32da54355ca 4 months ago 2.19 GB
docker.io/powerdns/pdns-auth-49 latest 8c1385c9deed 4 months ago 208 MB
docker.io/testcontainers/ryuk 0.13.0 b75bc7ce94c3 6 months ago 7.21 MB
As far as I can tell, there is
no way to do this in a manner that's even remotely composable. Your best bet is to basically do everything from within awk. Whatever the result would be, it certainly won't be pretty!
Contrast that with what you can do in PowerShell. You can write a couple of standalone functions[0] that are readable and composable, resulting in this pipeline:
podman image ls --all |
Replace-SpacesWithTabs |
ConvertFrom-Csv -Delimiter "`t" |
Sort-Object -Property {Convert-HumanSizeToBytes -Size $_.size} -Descending
[0] Repurposing this from a blog post I wrote:
https://www.cgl.sh/blog/posts/sh.html#this-should-be-basic
Because unix shell is irrevocably text-oriented, kludging in something like JSON is basically the best that can be done when you start to want to do structured operations on structured data. (I'm sympathetic to your point about the AWS CLI tools doing JSON by default though--that just sounds like bad design.)
Being text-oriented imposes drastic limits on composability. Because there is no structure, every element of a pipeline needs to do its own parsing of the input data. This leads to brittle pipelines where every element is tightly coupled to its input's textual representation.
As an exercise, try to write a pipeline that sorts podman images by size without removing the column headers[0]:
As far as I can tell, there is no way to do this in a manner that's even remotely composable. Your best bet is to basically do everything from within awk. Whatever the result would be, it certainly won't be pretty!Contrast that with what you can do in PowerShell. You can write a couple of standalone functions[0] that are readable and composable, resulting in this pipeline:
[0] Repurposing this from a blog post I wrote: https://www.cgl.sh/blog/posts/sh.html#this-should-be-basic