[ovs-dev] [PATCH v2]: ovsdb: add capability to dump table content in ovsdb-client

[Sabyasachi Sengupta]

> It seems we just need to extract the text between the table name and the first
> blank line below it. this should pretty easy with either awk or sed.
>
> As for efficiency, the db files I have access to are sufficiently
> small that the script should work in practise,
> especially used only for debugging.  Do you have a very large DB file
> or a different use case?

Our deployments typically have large amount of data in tables in ovsdb and 
finding out content of one table has been hard out of such large outputs, 
especially from usability perspective. One can always go to awk/sed, but for 
convenience traditional unix/linux systems often provides different options 
of standard commands that helps narrow down output and present it to users 
in a more presentable manner. I suppose I don't need to mention about 
usefulness of '-d' option of ls, or '-type' of find here. Although it is 
possible to write wrappers over 'find' that does the job of '-type dir', but 
having it as part of 'find' helps in standardizing output and allows users 
to do 'other' stuff rather than each program or individual user do this 
separately..

While one can write their own scriptlets, the other important question is 
how one would distribute this script to deployable systems. One easier 
approach if there is something available as part of ovs package itself.

The motivation of contributing this actually came from your existing 
DATABASE option that appears to eliminate the need to have similar scripts, 
but extend it with a new convenience TABLE option.