Introduce "generic" full & easily machine parsable output for AIX commands

While I agree with the idea itself - many commands could have output more easily parsable than right now - i disagree strongly with the idea to introduce "--<arg>" as a way to do it. The double-dash is a (non-POSIX) GNU extension to getopts and one doesn't need that in a UNIX system. It sure is possible to find unused command options for every command to access such a functionality. Alternatively there could be an enviroment setting like "export OUTPUTFORMAT=MACHINEREADABLE" to trigger a certain format.

IBM has evaluated the priority of this enhancement proposal relative to other future product content and determined that this Idea will not be pursued for a future product release

An interesting idea, certainly worthy of consideration.

Please note> one reason the commands have not changed is because these are the layouts that have been available since the late 70's and early 80's. That Linux, e.g., decided to drop many standard commands and replace them with new commands does not break all the programs people have used for years to automatically process these standard ls* commands.

As to two other points: the option -c is frequently used to output results in a single line (noteably in AIX legacy commands such as lslpp, not is classic POSIX commands) and frequently there is an option to omit headers completely.

If this can be done, without breaking compatibility to existing commands - great. Otherwise, I would hesitate to see how many things a change such as this would break for people, as myself, who have worked on and used these programs - asis - for over 25 years.

I definitely agree, some standardization could be good here, specifically, perhaps adding the -F flag to LVM and VPD queries.


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Device commands do have a standardized way to get this:
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#################
For lsdev, you can use -F
#################
# lsdev -H -Ccadapter -F 'name;class;subclass;type;location;physloc;description'
name;class;subclass;type;location;physloc;description
ent0;adapter;pciex;df1020e2e304;02-00;U78D2.001.XXXXXXX-P1-C9-T1;PCIe3 4-Port 10GbE SR Adapter (df1020e21410e304)
...


#################
For lsattr, you can do the same
#################
#lsattr -El sys0 -H -F 'attribute:value:description:user_settable'
attribute:value:description:user_settable

SW_dist_intr:false:Enable SW distribution of interrupts:True
autorestart:true:Automatically REBOOT OS after a crash:True
boottype:disk:N/A:False
capacity_inc:0.01:Processor capacity increment:False
capped:false:Partition is capped:False
chown_restrict:true:Chown Restriction Mode:True
clouddev:0:Recreate ODM devices on next boot:True
conslogin:enable:System Console Login :False
cpuguard:enable:CPU Guard:True


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However, VPD is less standardized.
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#################
For lssyscfg, I assume you mean lscfg -vl. That command is brutal to parse, and ODM does not have all of this. You can get useful data with:
# lsvpd | while read type data ; do if [[ "${type}" == "*YL" ]] ; then echo "" ; fi ; echo "$type $data" ; done | more | grep -p fcs0
*YL U78D2.001.XXXXXXX-P1-C9-T4
*FC ????????
*DS PCIe3 4-Port 16Gb FC Adapter (df1000e314101406)
*AX fcs0
*PL 03-00
*CD 10140614
*PN 01FT695
*SN Y050HY95A012
*EC P14609
*CC 578E
*MF 001D
*FN 01FT699
*ZM 3
*Z0 0000000C
*Z1 00000001
*Z2 00000000
*Z3 08090000
*Z4 01000001
*Z5 2E343135
*Z6 2E343135
*Z7 C0022C40
*Z8 20000010XXXXXXXX
*Z9 11.4.415.5
*ZA 11.4.415.5
*ZB 00000000
*ZC 00040000
*ZD 000000FF

In this case, it's missing "Network Address", but you can usually convert Z8. This doesn't work on virtual though. I usually do something more like this to get the data I want:

for fcs in `lsdev -C | grep fcs | cut -f 1 -d \ ` ; do
fscsi=`lsdev -p$fcs | grep -i scsi | cut -f 1 -d \ ` ; hn=`hostname`;
echo $hostname `lscfg -vsl $fcs | egrep 'fcs|Address' | tr . \ | tr -s [:space:]` FC ID: `lsattr -a scsi_id -F value -El $fscsi` ; done

vio2a fcs0 U78AE 001 XXXXXXX-P1-C19-L1-T1 Network Address 10000090FXXXXXXX FC ID: 0x450200
vio2a fcs1 U78AE 001 XXXXXXX-P1-C19-L1-T2 Network Address 10000090FXXXXXXX FC ID: 0x460200

That works on virtual hosts also.


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LVM is the worst, and requires transformation
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Other than cutting out specific data that you need, the AIX way is to use mkvgdata, and then parse the image.data file it produces.

Alternatively, you can do something like this:

# (lsvg rootvg | cut -c 1-45 ; lsvg rootvg | cut -c 46-999 ) | cut -f 1 -d \( | tr -d \ | tr : \ | while read variable value ; do echo ${variable}=${value} ; done | egrep -v '=$' | sort -r
VOLUMEGROUP=rootvg
VGSTATE=active
VGPERMISSION=read/write
VGIDENTIFIER=00XXXXX00000YYYYY0000ZZZZZZZZZZZ
...

This same works with lslv, or often you can get key info from "lsvg -l rootvg" or similar.

An additional improvement would be to have JSON output (say '--json'), as this would facilitate direct ingestion into multiple platforms.