That's not your original request though, to use line-based data. It seems you're determined not to use jq but if anything, json output | jq is more the unix way than piping everything through shell vars.
> That's not your original request though, to use line-based data.
It wasn't my request and OP (not me) said "line-based data" is best. The comment I replied to said "Newline-delimited JSON ... a line-based format".
If the only objection you have is "but that's line-based!" then you're in a completely different conversation.
> if anything, json output | jq is more the unix way than piping everything through shell vars.
The unix way is line-based. The comment I replied to is talking about line-based output. Line-based output is the only structure for data universal to unix cmdline tools - even tab/space isn't universal; sending structured non-line-delimited data to a program to unpack it is the least unix-like way to do it.
Also there's no pipe in the shell-variable output scheme I described, whereas "json | jq" is a shell pipeline.
And, the author isn’t suggesting only having JSON output, but adding it as an option for those of use that would make use of it. The plain text should remain as well (and has to or many, many things would break).
On a separate point, I find the JSON much easier to reason about. The wall of text output doesn’t work for my brain - I just can’t see it all. Structuring/nesting with clear delineations makes it far easier for me to grok.
