alt Hacker NewsIt's generally less robust to run CLI tools and scrape the output. Usually it isn't intended to be machine readable, and you have to handle extra failure modes, like incompatible tool versions, missing tools, incorrect parsers, etc.
It's the lazy-but-bad solution.
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journalctl is designed for these use cases and has options to solve those issues. The lazy part here is you not doing any research about this tool before dismissing it as "not best practice", which is exactly what the fuckups who wrote this article did.
I think a lot is riding on that “generally”. You’re right that the default approach/majority of cases should avoid shelling out wherever possible, but there are a large minority of situations where doing that does make sense, including:
Calling a CLI tool which will be present everywhere your program might reasonably be installed (e.g. if your program is a MySQL extension, it can probably safely assume the existence of mysqld).
The CLI tool you want to call is vendored into or downloaded by your wrapper program, reducing installation requirements overhead (this is not always a good idea for other reasons, but it does address a frequently cited reason not to shell out).
The CLI tool’s functionality is both disjoint with the rest of your program and something that you have a frequent need to hard-kill. (Forking is much more error prone than running a discrete subprocess; you can run your own program as a subprocess too, but in that case the functionality is probably not disjointed).
Talking to POSIX CLI tools in a POSIX compatible way (granted most things those tools do are easier/faster in a language’s stdlib).
journalctl with -o export produces a binary interchange format. Would you rather have bugs or API rot from that, or in an internal tool?
> Usually it isn't intended to be machine readable
It usually is, because that is the UNIX philosophy and programs that intermingle output with layout often stop doing that, when they don't write to a terminal.