Description of the feature request:

Make it so that bazel aquery --output=commands prints a list of commands with one command per line, similar to ninja -t commands.

Which category does this issue belong to?

CLI

What underlying problem are you trying to solve with this feature?

When debugging build issues I frequently need to extract specific compile commands. Although bazel aquery 'deps(target)' prints the command lines used to build a specific target, each command will be printed over N lines with one argument per line, which makes it harder to use command line tools to extract commands. For example, I cannot grep the output for a particular file name to extract all commands dealing with that file. And when I copy-paste the command into my terminal to edit it before running it, one-line-per-argument would typically cause the command to become taller than my terminal window, which makes it harder to edit in most shells. When working with Ninja-based build systems, I normally use the commands tool and grep its output. With Bazel I ended up writing an awk script that converts the aquery output into the one-line-per-command format:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

ORS=""

match($0, /Command Line: \((.*) \\/, a) {
  print a[1];
  print " ";
}
match($0, /^    (.*) \\$/, a) {
  print a[1];
  print " ";
}
match($0, /^    (.*)\)$/, a) {
  print a[1];
  print "\n";
}

But this script is clearly sensitive to Bazel's specific aquery format, which I imagine might change in the future. It also doesn't include environment variables, which fortunately I haven't needed so far. I guess it might be possible to feed one of the proto output formats into a separate program that converts the protos into the one-line-per-command format, but that would be a lot more work than my simple awk script. So the request is to add a straightforward and future-proof way to print the command list in this format, for example by adding an --output=commands flag.

Which operating system are you running Bazel on?

Linux

What is the output of bazel info release?

release 7.1.2

If bazel info release returns development version or (@non-git), tell us how you built Bazel.

No response

What's the output of git remote get-url origin; git rev-parse HEAD ?

No response

Have you found anything relevant by searching the web?

No response

Any other information, logs, or outputs that you want to share?

No response