JSON has become today's machine-readable output format (on Unix)

Recently, I needed to delete about 1,200 email messages to a particular destination from the mail queue on one of our systems. This turned out to be trivial, because this system was using Postfix and modern versions of Postfix can output mail queue status information in JSON format. So I could dump the mail queue status, select the relevant messages and print the queue IDs with jq , and feed this to Postfix to delete the messages. This experience has left me with the definite view that everything should have the option to output JSON for 'machine-readable' output, rather than some bespoke format. For new programs, I think that you should only bother producing JSON as your machine readable output format. (If you strongly object to JSON, sure, create another machine readable output format too. But if you don't care one way or another, outputting only JSON is probably the easiest approach for programs that don't already have such a format of their own.) This isn't because JSON is the wo ... Read full article.