dotnet list reference and other similar commands should not print header or should have a switch to disable it

Currently scenarios like:

dotnet list reference | xargs ...

are not working because we print headers. We should have a switch to disable that or not print it at all.

[MichaelSimons]

I’m thinking we need an option akin to git status --porcelain to support machine-readable output.

Yes please. I just encountered a scenario where I need to retrieve the RID from the cmd line. Having dotnet info support machine-readable output would be nice.

cc @KathleenDollard

[jasonkarns]

Alternatively, some have suggested that stderr should get all of the user-friendly text while stdout gets the machine-readable text.

This is quite widespread in the *nix world and was the first thing I and others typically reach for. Indeed, I was driven here to post about this issue precisely because:

for m in $(dotnet ef migrations list 2>/dev/null); do

didn’t do the correct thing. (Because the first two lines of output on STDOUT are Build started... and Build succeeded. before the actual migrations are printed.)

It’s all well and good for there to be --quiet or --verbose flags for fine-grained control. But even if those were available, I would still consider the CLI to be violating convention and norms if it continues to print diagnostic output to STDOUT by default.