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[bug#30053] [PATCH 1/3] Improve appearance of tabular output.
From: |
Steve Sprang |
Subject: |
[bug#30053] [PATCH 1/3] Improve appearance of tabular output. |
Date: |
Thu, 11 Jan 2018 15:32:35 -0800 |
Hi Ludovic,
On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 1:32 PM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> Long time no see! ;-)
Yeah, it's been a while!
> I have a disappointing explanation I’m afraid: the reason columns look
> this way is because they are tab-separated, which in turn makes it easy
> to filter with ‘cut’:
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> $ guix package -A | cut -f1 | head
> 0ad
> 0ad-data
> 0xffff
> 4store
> 4ti2
> a2ps
> aalib
> abbaye
> abc
> abcde
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
I'm still inserting a tab between columns, so I believe 'cut' still
works as expected in this case. Initially, I was separating columns
with a few spaces, but that broke some of the tests that were relying
on cut, so I switched back to tab.
> An example from the manual (info "(guix) Invoking guix build"):
>
> guix build --quiet --keep-going \
> `guix package -A | cut -f1,2 address@hidden
Argh, this use case fails because of the extra inserted whitespace.
> The idea was to have this shell-scripting-friendly format, and to
> provide fancier output in other commands, such as --search (which is in
> fact script-friendly as well thanks to recutils).
>
> Silly? Awesome? Ugly? What do people think? :-)
Another potential drawback of this patch is that it tends to make
output lines longer than before. This might make line-wrapping less
pleasant when using smaller terminal windows/screens.
-Steve
[bug#30053] [PATCH 1/3] Improve appearance of tabular output., Danny Milosavljevic, 2018/01/12