[Mister_Snuggles]

In the FreeBSD world, we have libxo[0] which allows utilities to produce structured output.

To use your example, taking the output of ps and finding the process using the most RAM, you could do something like this:

  $ ps aux --libxo json|jq '."process-information"."process" | sort_by((.rss)|tonumber) | .[-1]'
  {
    "user": "root",
    "pid": "2372",
    "percent-cpu": "0.0",
    "percent-memory": "11.4",
    "virtual-size": "2149236",
    "rss": "1906584",
    "terminal-name": "- ",
    "state": "SC",
    "start-time": "21May22",
    "cpu-time": "1307:09.11",
    "command": "bhyve: postgresql (bhyve)"
  }

It's not pretty, but it does let you get structured data out of most of the base system utilities to make the slicing and dicing easier.

[0] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=libxo&sektion=3