[bug#30053] [PATCH 1/3] Improve appearance of tabular output.

[Steve Sprang <steve.sprang@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 5:28 AM, Roel Janssen <roel@gnu.org> wrote:
> If we use GNU awk instead of cut, I think any whitespace will work:
>   $ guix package -A | awk '{ print $1 "@" $2 }'
>
> And then we can optimize the output reading experience for our users
> instead of for the 'cut' program.

I like this proposal, unless there is a strong reason to prefer 'cut'?

We would obviously need to update relevant scripts and documentation.
It might also break any user scripts relying on the current behavior.

Since awk can more flexibly separate fields (versus cut's single
character delimiter) I could modify this patch to separate columns
with one or two spaces instead of tabs. This generally produces a
table with shorter line lengths and a neater presentation.

-Steve