In the past I found myself occasionally trying to mangle the list of packages portage wants to install via the commandline. For this to work with sed, grep, and awk, the emerge command should be able to print a (ba)sh-usable list of plain "valid atoms". Usage scenario: Consider emerge -e world, or any other major emerge-operation, such as re-using an existing world-file on a new install. After the 307th package, some minor tool fails. (diffutils in my case). --skipfirst doesn't work together with --resume, since using --resume is semi-random, especially with EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=-jX with X>1. --keep-going is not really an option either, especially if the system is not fully sane. Emerge would simply omit major parts of its task-list just because a minor package is broken or doesn't build. Having an option as i propose it would enable me to do an "emerge -p --resume --plain-atoms | sed '/br0ken-pkg/d'" instead of having to do a ridiculous amount of seding/grepping/and whatsoever to get rid of the pretty-ascii-printing. A second option --plain-full-atoms could be used for displaying the full atoms with version info (like =category/package-version::repository).
(In reply to comment #0) > Having an option as i propose it would enable me to do an "emerge -p --resume > --plain-atoms | sed '/br0ken-pkg/d'" You might get a similar effect by using --exclude together with --resume.
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