scripting with SYMCLI

I'm new to EMC and Solutions Enabler but love the command line capabilities. For my HDS storage I have a lot of custom reporting in place and want to continue this with the EMC storage. We have a couple of VMAX arrays now and I have SE installed on a linux host.

When I run a command like the following...

symcfg list -pool -thin

I get a lot of useful information but trying to figure out how to parse the output is challenging. I'd like to start with just grabbing basic pool information. But I'd like to write my script and parser so that it works no matter what the thin pools may be named. There appear to be no fixed labels or identifiers on the lines with the thin pools other than the pool names and since we created those I know if I just look for that naming format it wil only work in my shop.

Are there and command line switches to tell the SYMCLI tools to produce alternate output formats more suitable for programatic parsing? Output with a field delimiter would be nice.

How do automation/scripting folks on this list handle this? Scripting jobs to take specific actions is very easy but scripting jobs to collect information using "list" and "show" commands and then take action based on the output seems unnecessarily difficult.

Thanks!

Vic Engle