A couple of years ago I wrote a somewhat controversial article on the topic of Bringing the Unix Philosophy to the 21st Century by adding a JSON output option to CLI tools. This allows easier parsing in scripts by using JSON parsing tools like jq, jello, jp, etc. without arcane awk, sed, cut, tr, reverse, etc. incantations. It was controversial because there seem to be a lot of folks who don’t think writing bespoke parsers for each task is a big deal. Others think JSON is evil. There are strong ...