XML query language and another OS/XML suggestion

[Stephen D. Williams]

Yes, the pipe mechanism takes on whole new meaning with XML.

It wouldn't be all that large of a job to do a lot of it.  Obviously adding --XML capabilities
wouldn't be that tough since it's simply adding labeling tags to output that is already
formatted.

Even /proc/xml wouldn't be that hard for output, a little tougher for input, but allowed input
would be so restrictive that a simple regex parser would suffice for most things.

Hacking bash in an appropriate way is more difficult, however there is already an sgrep (SGML
grep) and external tools can handle all of this like Perl, Java, Tcl/TK.

I suppose what we need is a group to start standardizing a DTD that settles what to call
everything in a system (ports, network address, process/thread, user, etc.).  That's probably
the biggest job.

sdw

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

> Stephen D. Williams <sdw at lig.net> wrote:
> >A note on the /dev/proc/xml mention: I've been thinking for a while that
> EVERY data/meta-data
> >interface to a typical OS (such as Linux/Unix) should have an XML form.
> Maybe add or override
> >-X  or --XML to all commands where it could possibly make sense.  ps,
> netstat, lsof, ifconfig,
> >df, egrep, ls, etc. are all good candidates.  Add simple tree/value
> extraction to bash and
> >you'd have more portability for a lot of things.
>
> Wouldn't that be great? The UNIX pipe model has suffered from not having a
> standard structured format, as has the /proc file system.  Not to mention
> what this could do to an OS like Plan9 where "everything is a file" and
> textual formats abound...
>
> However this would be a major undertaking. Maybe someone in the GNU project
> would consider it, though.
>
> Have fun,
>
>     Oren Ben-Kiki
>
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