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agjmills | 4 years ago

Imagine if http APIs has similar output to lsof or df -h - nobody would write a script to use them! JSON makes a lot of sense, but a human-parseable format is also needed.

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hnlmorg|4 years ago

You're conflating two different concerns:

1. human review

2. scripting / automation

In case one, human readable formats are obviously preferable. But the moment you need to script a command, you want it in a machine readable format.

A perfect example of the differences between the two are how badly spaces in file names are handled. Granted POSIX deserve a lot of the blame here too.