Sam Johnston <samj@samj.net> writes:
but in any case INI files are simple, standard across platforms, well defined, etc.
You can parse them in shell like this<http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/55#comment_24> :
#!/bin/sh [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ] && exit 1 sed -e 's/[[:space:]]*\=[[:space:]]*/=/g' \ -e 's/;.*$//' \ -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//' \ -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//' \ -e "s/^\(.*\)=\([^\"']*\)$/\1=\"\2\"/" \ < $1 \ | sed -n -e "/^\[$2\]/,/^\s*\[/{/^[^;].*\=.*/p;}"
You've completely missed the point again. (Perhaps understandably, since you're not in the target audience for this format.) while read K V; do FOO; done is something you can type in a shell one-liner, which is the most interesting 'use case' (sorry, horrible jargon!) for shell people. This complex hack is not, and I note that you had to google for it rather than writing it off the top of your head, which should have been enough to make the point clear. (Incidentally, it doesn't get INI quoting right. Doing it correctly and allowing for backslash escapes is somewhat harder.) Whitespace separated KEY VALUE is better-defined than INI[1], can be parsed by shell read, by C strtok() or strsep(), and is generally pleasant to work with in languages without sophisticated string handling or data structures. Here's your sample translated to that format: id decca5a5-8952-4004-9793-cdbbf05c3c63 category server title Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Virtual Appliance summary Base installation of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 content.cpu 2 content.memory 4Gb link.disk[0].id 4696b561-a253-42b4-bd27-7aa4950e0a60 link.disk[0].dev sda link.network[0].id 45a73b80-c957-4ae1-97c6-b70652eba1d1 link.network[0].dev eth0 mc.state RUNNING br.meter.rate 0.10 br.meter.currency USD br.meter.unit hours br.meter.total 35.27 pm.monitor.cpu 75.2 pm.monitor.mem 1059374258 mc.ops.start http://example.com/decca5a5-8952-4004-9793-cdbbf05c3c63/ops/start mc.ops.stop http://example.com/decca5a5-8952-4004-9793-cdbbf05c3c63/ops/stop mc.ops.restart http://example.com/decca5a5-8952-4004-9793-cdbbf05c3c63/ops/restart mc.ops.suspend http://example.com/decca5a5-8952-4004-9793-cdbbf05c3c63/ops/suspend id 4696b561-a253-42b4-bd27-7aa4950e0a60 category storage content.size 148251374 link.self virtual-disk.vmdk id 45a73b80-c957-4ae1-97c6-b70652eba1d1 category network content.vlan 4095 content.dhcp true content.subnet 192.168.0.0 content.netmask 255.255.0.0 content.gateway 192.168.0.1 vnd.com.cisco.cdp true I'll not comment on the key space or conflation of objects into one namespace with a category key in this post. Cheers, Chris. [1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initialization_file for details on some of the variation seen in the wild. There's no formal spec to disambiguate.