[libvirt] [PATCHv4 1/2] virsh: add new --details option to pool-list

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 09:58:34AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:35:32PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> > On 06/22/2010 12:24 PM, Hugh O. Brock wrote:
> > >> Correct, we shouldn't change this behaviour - it'll break apps parsing
> > >> the output
> > > 
> > > FWIW Rich Jones complains that the output as it stands is nigh on
> > > unparseable anyway. Perhaps we should consider that a bug, and fix
> > > it...
> > 
> > The new --details option is our chance to change output - it outputs
> > whatever format we want, because it is a new flag; Rich, do you have any
> > preferences about what it _should_ output?
> 
> --details is still targetted at humans. If you want something more
> easily parseable it should use a structured format like CSV. So I
> don't think we should be overloading --details for this purpose.

CSV is a good format, but beware the many ways to shoot yourself in
the foot.  I recommend using my program "csvtool" (in Fedora/Debian)
which can fully and safely parse CSV output from shell scripts, or use
a library (eg. Text::CSV for Perl, or csv for Python).  More about
this subject here:

  http://libguestfs.org/virt-df.1.html#note_about_csv_format

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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