-------------------------------------
Michael A. Ballbach: N0ZTQ, yeh-zehn.
ballbach@lorien.ml.org
http://lorien.ml.org/~ballbach/index.html
"The next war will be fought with nuclear weapons,
the next, with sticks." -- Albert Einstein.
On Wed, 30 Apr 1997, Tim Hollebeek wrote:
> Frank Sweetser writes ...
> >
> > While I agree that for programs, a non-human readable presentation with
> > fixed offsets is generally more parsable (perl doesn't count here :),
> > probably the single most useful function I've found for /proc is for
> > finding out what the status of your machine is when things have gone
> > down the tubes, often off of a root/boot floppy set. When you're dealing
> > with that kind of a setup, it's certainly much nicer to just use 'cat'
> > instead of a suite designed to parse some binary data. Perhaps make
> > the textual proc a compile-time option, and then add a /dev/kmem type
> > interface that presents a binary single-file version of the proc
> > interface?
>
> How much more complex is a /bin/proccat that (for example) changes null
> terminated key:value pairs into text? E.g. the proc files would contain
> something like:
>
> "key1\0val1\0key2\0val2\0..."
>
> which would translate to:
>
> key1 : val1
> key2 : val2
> ...
>
> Support for hierarchical entries, simple tables, etc doesn't make it much
> bigger. Anything can appear in a field (including ':'), and the binary
> version is trivially machine readable. /bin/proccat is likely to succeed
> whenever /bin/cat would, so it is usable when your system is hosed.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Tim Hollebeek | Disclaimer :=> Everything above is a true statement,
> Electron Psychologist | for sufficiently false values of true.
> Princeton University | email: tim@wfn-shop.princeton.edu
> ----------------------| http://wfn-shop.princeton.edu/~tim (NEW! IMPROVED!)
>