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Comment by fredrb | Hacker News Reader

Very good article.

Another point that I think is valuable is: "Output one line per record data"

This is useful if your CLI that has to output data to the user. Makes it easier to interface with programs like `grep`

I'd add to that an option to deliminate records with NUL instead of new line and treat all other characters as literals.

Suppressing the header line and any fancy formatting jazz is a nice idea as well, since otherwise there's invariably some buggery needed to strip it like:

    ps | tail -n +2 | cmd_with_just_records

or, if you're doing column extraction as well, I like:

    ps | perl -lanE'say $F[0] if 2..eof'

[ps used here as a stand-in for some other command that has a fixed header. I'm aware that you can omit it via hte somewhat long-winded `ps -o "pid= command= [...]"' there, but afaik there's no simple switch for 'do what you were going to, just without a header line at the top']

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