Oh, no! Here it comes again. Perhaps much more important than
endianness or punctuation is once and for all settling the question of
whether /proc is for humans or for programs. Because these two types of
entities have different, often diametrically-opposed, formatting
requirements.
(My take on this question is that programs should not be looking in /proc
at all; everything shown there should be available in binary form via
syscall, and if you want to use the data in scripts there should be
userspace programs that use the syscalls and provide script-appropriate
formatting. This way, programs have no column-order or spelling issues to
deal with (on the input side, anyway), and other format changes should be
rare because in most cases the format will be tied to the CPU
architecture. Meanwhile humans get to read stuff that isn't cluttered
with format version numbers or obfuscated to make mechanical parsing easier.)
-- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@IUPUI.Edu Some things are not improved when made "graphical". Imagine how crude Kilmer's "Trees" would be if reduced to comic-book form.
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