Open philrz opened 1 year ago
A community user recently started making use of -f text
, and after seeing their struggles I added some minimal coverage of the format in a new Simplified Text Outputs section of the zq
command docs (https://github.com/brimdata/zed/pull/5170).
However, even since then, in another community Slack thread a user reported being confused by the \x09
appearing in their output in place of a tab character in their original data. Those of us that are aware of the project's history know this to be a side effect of Zed's Zeek-y roots, but this would be awkward to disclose to a user as if it's a good thing, further making the case that we revisit the format.
I suspect there's some overlap between this and #5042.
At the time this issue is being filed, Zed is at commit a2626a7.
I sometimes reach for
text
output mode in the CLI tools such as when grabbing individual values to populate environment variables in my Bash scripts. I recently went to output atime
value and was thrown by how it's currently printed as epoch seconds.The mode has been mostly untouched for years, so this specific example is an artifact of when Zeek-like output seemed like a reasonable default. Things have changed enough that something like undecorated ZSON would probably be more appropriate.