In my ideal world all system utilities (and many applications) output relational tuples, and the shell includes a relational algebraic query tool --equivalent to SQL, but with a more composable syntax. Instead of awk'ing and grepping, we'd be doing Restrict, Join, Union, and Project on the output of <i>anything</i>, and there'd be no need to be dumping into a separate database system just to be able to have access to the kind of recomposable, queryable, consistent, discoverable information management that is every user's right since Codd first penned <i>“A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.”</i> in <i>1970</i>.<p>Sorry, old-man-me is feeling unwell today, back to bed to take a nap.