Problem is, a colon is a valid character for fields, particularly ethernet
MAC addresses, and interface aliases.
> I'm not a major expert in c, but it's not that hard to read to the
> colon, read past any white space, and read some more. :) With shell
> scripting, use cut -f 1 -d :.
And end up cutting a MAC field into little pieces.
> Anyway, I don't see why there is such a big deal being made about this,
> when it's not too hard to do...
You've obviously never tried. :-/
> What's harder, writing the low level user interfaces to networking
> routines? Or writing a program that parses a file?
Yes.
-Dan