| You are somehow right but miss some points out of anger For instance, your awk example with /etc/passwd : the important thing is not that awk fails to be the perfect way to parse the file's content. The important thing is that you can parse the file with a generic tool like awk. To me, this is the good idea behind all this : using a standard set of tool, you can process the data. I cannot find a better alternative, and you failed to provide one too : standardize the files ? Their format, yes, not their content. Create a dedicated tool for each kind of file ? Good idea, people would need to learn hundreds of tools, one for each file. Because most of those files are stored in ascii and can be handled as regular files, you can use just cat to get the content, you do not need to run a specific tool with internal binary parser that create syscall or grab data from shared memory or whatever (but you could). Another thing : a file-system with an "undelete" capability is a filesystem that do not support data deletion. That would be pretty useless for most use cases, so most filesystems (from the Linux's gang to ntfs to ufs to refs to fat) do not implement this. |