Bug#254243: (no subject)

[Olaf van der Spek]

martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Olaf van der Spek <Olaf at XWIS.Net> [2008.10.19.1125 +0200]:
>> I think it should be merged with #222324
>> I'm willing to continue work on my patch from 2005 if Luk and Martin agree.
> 
> I don't want to have to rely on a width switch. I'd say that netstat
> should output line-oriented and stop worrying about terminal size.
> First of all, IPv6-connected hosts are unlikely to be so old that
> they can only do width-80 or non-tty terminals, and second, the days
> of tools like route/arp/netstat which present formatted output
> (which is harder to process) are hopefully over in favour of tools
> that print the maximum of information and leave it to other tools to
> do the formatting. I really like /bin/ip for that reason, and
> because its output is the same as its input. Tabular output, like
> netstat, is IMHO not worth the trouble, especially if it means that
> the output cannot be complete.

That's fine for machine readable output, but what about human readable 
output?
And how to handle existing scripts that rely on this specific tabular 
output?