> Похоже вы просто не писали толком на шелле.

И мало кто пишет толком.

> export LANG="C"
> blablabla
> и 99.9% внешних программ вернут заведомо известный контент с которым вполне можно
> работать в случае если программа не поддерживает форматирование вывода сама(такие как
> stat, date..).

ps. Стандартная, казалось бы, команда. И комментарий в tkps:

################################################################
# This runs ps with the (optional) user command line args.
# It fills the listbox with a list of all the processes running,
# using the ps output.
#
# How do we locate the PID of a process?
#
# We then look through the keyword (header) list to see if we find the PID
# column, and remember which column that is, so we can operate on selected
# processes. Yeesh. After we do 'split' on each line of output, we need
# to eliminate the multiple blanks, and we still are hoping that ps
# doesn't insert a blank between two words in a column. There is no
# direct portable system call which gives basic process information about
# all processes on a machine. There is just 'ps', and we are parsing the
# random text output of a stupid utility program.
#
# Argh. unix sucks.