Patch for "doveadm -f table" nit (was Re: Dovecot current number of connections being used.)

[Willem Jan Withagen]

On 19-3-2015 9:30, Gedalya wrote:
> On 03/18/2015 08:49 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> There's no reason why flow and pager should write headers to stderr
>> because it would always result only in a mess. But instead of changing
>> table headers to write to stdout, I think a better fix would be to
>> make tab formatter write headers to stderr. Including headers in
>> stdout makes it more difficult to write scripts that access the actual
>> data. For example now you can do "doveadm who -1 | sort" and the
>> output will work. If headers were written to stdout you'd have to make
>> it more complicated. Also you can now easily specify what you want to
>> do with the headers, 2>/dev/null if you don't care about them or 2>&1
>> if you want to include them in stdout (which works even after |sort).
>>
>> So, I'll add in my v2.3 TODO that tab formatter should write to stderr..
> 
> I've been using "-f flow fetch text | sed s/^text=//" when training
> spamassasin. Couldn't find a straightforward 'fetch raw message'. Seems
> unnecessarily awkward. Moving headers to stderr would help this, though.

I think that that is sort of forgoing the pupsoe of stderr.

Moving things to stderr for reasons of parsing and other trivia, just
complicates other sysadmin scripts where it is expected that only errors
are written to stderr. I would suggest to write all std-info just to
regular stdout, and deal with reporting tools just there.

just my 2 cts,

--WjW