In my ideal world all system utilities (and many applications) output relational tuples, and the shell includes a relational algebraic query tool --equivalent to SQL, but with a more composable syntax. Instead of awk'ing and grepping, we'd be doing Restrict, Join, Union, and Project on the output of anything, and there'd be no need to be dumping into a separate database system just to be able to have access to the kind of recomposable, queryable, consistent, discoverable information management that is every user's right since Codd first penned “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.” in 1970.

Sorry, old-man-me is feeling unwell today, back to bed to take a nap.

Onme