On 07/31/2015 at 12:37 PM, Lisi Reisz wrote: > And no, ip is not easier to parse. It may be for you, and even for > most people - but I find it so difficult to read that it is hard to > get anything out of it. (And I do mean read - physically read). But > ip clearly gives more information - _if_ you can read it. ;-)
I usually interpret "parse" in this sort of context to refer to machine parsing, not reading by humans - i.e., ease of parsing refers to how comparatively easy it is to write a program to look at the output and extract exactly the piece of information you want without any extraneous bits. "easier to parse" does _not_ mean the same thing as "easier to read". I'm not familiar with the use of 'ip' (it took me half-a-dozen tries and several references to the man page to figure out how to get it to produce any potentially useful output, rather than just its usage message or an error message), but at a glance, I can see some merit to the claim that the output of 'ip address' is more readily parseable by e.g. a shell script than is the output of 'ifconfig'. To human eyes, however, at a glance the output of 'ip address' is significantly less readable than that of 'ifconfig' - which is saying something. I certainly would not want to have to use 'ip' to the exclusion of 'ifconfig', if this sort of output is the best that it provides. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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