José Iván López González, 06 November 2019
Third-party programs and scripts (e.g., YaST) parse the output of the snapper CLI commands to get some information. For example, to find out the number of all pre and post snapshots, scripts can run the following:
snapper list | awk '/pre/||/post/{print $3}'
The output from snapper list command is a table intended to be read by humans, not by scripts. This could make difficult to parse snapper outputs. But even worse, every change in this table (e.g., adding a new column or changing the format of their values) could ruin scripts that relied on the previous version.
snapper --iso list --disable-used-space
# | Type | Pre # | Date | User | Cleanup | Description | Userdata
---+--------+-------+---------------------+------+---------+-----------------------+--------------
0 | single | | | root | | current |
1* | single | | 2019-10-15 12:45:25 | root | | first root filesystem |
2 | single | | 2019-10-15 12:51:06 | root | number | after installation | important=yes
3 | pre | | 2019-10-15 13:06:08 | root | number | zypp(zypper) | important=no
4 | post | 3 | 2019-10-15 13:07:41 | root | number | | important=no
All that could make quite error prone to work with snapper CLI output and, for that reason, snapper now offers some new options to use CSV or JSON for lists.
Now, the following new global options can be used with snapper CLI: –machine-readable, –csvout, –jsonout and –separator. Option –machine-readable requires an argument, and accepted values are csv and json. –csvout and –jsonout are only shortcuts for –machine-readable csv and –machine-readable json respectively. In case that –machine-readable csv or –csvout is used, the –separator option can be indicated to set another CSV char separator.
These new options only affect to the CLI commands that generate a table as result, that is: snapper list, snapper list-configs and snapper get-config. Here some usage examples:
snapper --csvout --separator \; list
config;subvolume;number;default;active;type;pre-number;date;user;used-space;cleanup;description;userdata
root;/;0;no;no;single;;;root;;;current;
root;/;1;yes;yes;single;;2019-10-15 12:45:25;root;88047616;;first root filesystem;
root;/;2;no;no;single;;2019-10-15 12:51:06;root;12226560;number;after installation;important=yes
root;/;3;no;no;pre;;2019-10-15 13:06:08;root;540672;number;zypp(zypper);important=no
root;/;4;no;no;post;3;2019-10-15 13:07:41;root;81920;number;;important=no
snapper --jsonout --separator \; list --type single
{
"root": [
{
"subvolume": "/",
"number": 0,
"default": false,
"active": false,
"date": "",
"user": "root",
"used-space": null,
"description": "current",
"userdata": null
},
{
"subvolume": "/",
"number": 1,
"default": true,
"active": true,
"date": "2019-10-15 12:45:25",
"user": "root",
"used-space": 88047616,
"description": "first root filesystem",
"userdata": null
},
{
"subvolume": "/",
"number": 2,
"default": false,
"active": false,
"date": "2019-10-15 12:51:06",
"user": "root",
"used-space": 12226560,
"description": "after installation",
"userdata": {
"important": "yes"
}
}
]
}
Moreover, those three commands (list, list-configs and get-config) also accept a new –columns option to filter and sort the columns to show (indicating column names separated by comma). The list of possible columns for each command is documented in the snapper help:
snapper --csvout list --columns number,type,pre-number
number,type,pre-number
0,single,
1,single,
2,single,
3,pre,
4,post,3
5,pre,
6,post,5
7,pre,
8,post,7
Thanks to these new options, now scripts can obtain an easy-to-parse and invariant snapper output. For example, extracting the number of all pre and post snapshots can be performed by the following script:
snapper --csvout list --columns number,type | awk 'BEGIN {FS=","} /pre/||/post/ {print $1}'
This feature is available in snapper since version 0.8.6.