Re:Show HN: A Unixy approach to WebSockets
by ackalker on Sunday February 15, 2015 @06:21AM
(#9052348)
>Being able to stream a collections of bytes (and collections of collections of bytes, recursively) is one case that I find myself wanting when sending data between programs at the command line.
If you don't mind using JSON as intermediary format, you might like to have a look at jq: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/
jq can also convert raw (binary) data to JSON objects containing strings (and vice versa) for further processing. Naturally, jq filters can be pipelined in many useful ways.
Re:Show HN: A Unixy approach to WebSockets
by Freaky on Sunday February 15, 2015 @09:35AM
(#9052689)
There's work ongoing on FreeBSD to add libxo support to tools in the base system, which will allow you to get (amongst others) JSON out of various commands: https://github.com/Juniper/libxo
Being able to stream a collections of bytes (and collections of collections of bytes, recursively) is one case that I find myself wanting when sending data between programs at the command line.
Consider:
This, of course, has problems for some inputs because ls is sending a single stream and xargs is trying to re-parse it into a collection on which to use rm.If there were some way to encode items in a collection OOB, you could pipe data through programs while getting some guarantees about it being represented correctly in the recipient program. (Sometimes you see scripts that do this by separating data in a stream with NUL delimiters, but this doesn't work recursively or if your main data stream might have NUL in it.)