Re: [TUHS] Tech Sq elevator (Was: screen editors) [ really I think efficiency now ]

[Michael Parson <mparson@bl.org>]

On Mon, 13 Jan 2020, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> [Resending as this got squashed a few days ago. Jon, sorry for the
> duplicate. Again.]
>
> On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 4:38 PM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:

<snip>

>> Many people have claimed, incorrectly in my opinion, that this model
>> fails in the modern era because it only works on text data.  They
>> change the subject when I point out that ImageMagick works on binary
>> data.  And, there are now stream processing utilities for JSON data
>> and such that show that the UNIX model still works IF you understand
>> it and know how to use it.
>
>
> Certainly. I think you hit the nail on the head with the proviso
> that one must _understand_ the Unix model and how to use it. If one
> does so, it's very powerful indeed, and it really is applicable more
> often than not. But it is not a panacea (not that anyone suggested it
> is). As an example, how do I apply an unmodified `grep` to arbitrary
> JSON data (which may span more than one line)? Perhaps there is a way
> (I can imagine a 'record2line' program that consumes a single JSON
> object and emits it as a syntactically valid one-liner...) but I can
> also imagine all sorts of ways that might go wrong.

And here, understanding the model is important, namely, grep is the
wrong tool for searching/parsing JSON output. Dealing with JSON from the
shell, you should use jq.  I've been dragged kicking and screaming into
dealing with JSON, and about all I can say about it is, I like it about
this >< much more than XML. :)

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ