On Wed, 31 Oct 2018 20:48:05 -0600, David Ahern wrote:

quoted

  spacing with a special character in the format string, that is:

	"%S.%Qr.%Qs  %Al:%Pl %Ar:%Pr  %p\n"

  would mean "align everything to the right, distribute remaining
  whitespace between %S, %Qr and %Qs". But it looks rather complicated
  at a glance.
  

My concern here is that once this goes in for 1 command, the others in
iproute2 need to follow suit - meaning same syntax style for all
commands. Given that I'd prefer we get a reasonable consensus on syntax
that will work across commands -- ss, ip, tc. If it is as simple as
column names with a fixed order, that is fine but just give proper
consideration given the impact.

FWIW I just started piping iproute2 commands to jq.  Example:

tc -s -j qdisc show dev em1 | \
	jq -r '.[] |  [.kind,.parent,.handle,.offloaded,.bytes,.packets,.drops,.overlimits,.requeues,.backlog,.qlen,.marked] | @tsv'

JSONification would probably be quite an undertaking for ss :(