Syntax of 'show babel' commands?

[Ondrej Zajicek]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 01:30:49PM +0200, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen via Bird-users wrote:
> They're supposed to work the way you specify, and it does for me:
> 
> bird> show proto babel1
> Name       Proto      Table      State  Since         Info
> babel1     Babel      ---        up     2025-10-11
> bird> show babel interfaces babel1 "br-lan"
> babel1:
> Interface  State  Auth  RX cost   Nbrs   Timer Next hop (v4)   Next hop (v6)
> br-lan     Up     Yes        96      1   2.159 10.42.6.1       fe80::da58:d7ff:fe00:1d2b
> 
> I think what's happening is a symbol collision: you've named your babel
> instance 'babel', but the command line parser has 'babel' as a reserved
> keyword, so it barfs.

Yes, exactly. In earlier versions, we forbade names that collide with
keywords, but that caused compatibility issues when users upgrade to a
new version, which may have new keywords that are accidentally the same
as user-defined names. We changed that so a used-defined name overrides
the keyword, so there is no compatibility problem, but it may lead to
a strange behavior like this, as (due to how our parser is written) the
name-keyword distinction is done independently of any context.

-- 
Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo

Ondrej 'Santiago' Zajicek (email: santiago at crfreenet.org)
"To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so."