Re: PROPOSAL: /proc standards (was dot-proc interface [was: /proc

Rik van Riel
2001-11-06T21:24:45Z

On 6 Nov 2001, Erik Hensema wrote:

> >1) IT SHOULD NOT BE PRETTY. No tabs to line up columns. No "progress
> >bars." No labels except as "proc comments" (see later). No in-line labelling.
>
> It should not be pretty TO HUMANS. Slight difference. It should
> be pretty to shellscripts and other applications though.

I really fail to see your point, it's trivial to make
files which are easy to read by humans and also very
easy to parse by shellscripts.

PROCESSOR=0
VENDOR_ID=GenuineIntel
CPU_FAMILY=6
MODEL=6
MODEL_NAME="Celeron (Mendocino)"
.....

As you can see, this is easily readable by humans,
while "parsing" by a shell script would be as follows:

. /proc/cpuinfo

After which you could just "echo $PROCESSOR" or
something like that ...

Yes, this is probably a bad example, but it does show
that machine-readable and human-readable aren't mutually
exclusive.

regards,

Rik
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