At work whenever we need to build little command line tools, my team is always vexxed by my guideline to have the meat+potatoes in a script that reads well-formatted data off stdin , and outputs well formatted-data to stout. They always wanna have some stupid interactive prompts and saving to files baked right in.
This is exactly why. You wanna save to a file?? > file
You want to read from a file? cat |
You want to save to a file but swap commas for colons? Sed.
You get so much FOR FREE w/ the GNU toolkit, even for what you build yourself, by thinking in streams.
This.
This was the standard for years. Matchmaking kinda killed it.
There were 3rd part server browser services that could fill the gap, though. I wanna say GameSpy or something was a popular one in the late 90s