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The "human readability" warning is (a.) annoying and (b.) inconsistent #6749

@ericpromislow

Description

@ericpromislow

Description

$ docker images | grep pattern
WARNING: This output is designed for human readability. For machine-readable output, please use --format.
<OUTPUT> …

but

$ docker ps | grep pattern
<OUTPUT> …

has no warning.

The warning for docker images breaks some 50 years of experience on writing command pipelines. I shouldn't need to have to repeatedly type --format table when that's the default output. And if you all are planning on changing the default output format, well good luck with that.

Reproduce

See above

Expected behavior

The CLI shouldn't emit warnings on the output when it's written to a non-tty.

docker version

Client:
 Version:           29.0.2-rd
 API version:       1.51 (downgraded from 1.52)
 Go version:        go1.25.4
 Git commit:        5a2d7eb
 Built:             Tue Nov 18 23:32:26 2025
 OS/Arch:           darwin/arm64
 Context:           rancher-desktop

Server:
 Engine:
  Version:          28.3.3
  API version:      1.51 (minimum version 1.24)
  Go version:       go1.24.8
  Git commit:       bea959c7b793b32a893820b97c4eadc7c87fabb0
  Built:            Sun Oct 12 08:01:14 2025
  OS/Arch:          linux/arm64
  Experimental:     false
 containerd:
  Version:          v2.1.5
  GitCommit:        fcd43222d6b07379a4be9786bda52438f0dd16a1
 runc:
  Version:          1.3.3
  GitCommit:        d842d7719497cc3b774fd71620278ac9e17710e0
 docker-init:
  Version:          0.19.0
  GitCommit:

docker info

Client:
 Version:    29.0.2-rd
 Context:    rancher-desktop
 Debug Mode: false
 Plugins:
  buildx: Docker Buildx (Docker Inc.)
    Version:  v0.30.1
    Path:     /Users/ericp/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-buildx
  compose: Docker Compose (Docker Inc.)
    Version:  v2.40.3
    Path:     /Users/ericp/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-compose

Server:
 Containers: 32
  Running: 17
  Paused: 0
  Stopped: 15
 Images: 24
 Server Version: 28.3.3
 Storage Driver: overlay2
  Backing Filesystem: extfs
  Supports d_type: true
  Using metacopy: false
  Native Overlay Diff: true
  userxattr: false
 Logging Driver: json-file
 Cgroup Driver: cgroupfs
 Cgroup Version: 2
 Plugins:
  Volume: local
  Network: bridge host ipvlan macvlan null overlay
  Log: awslogs fluentd gcplogs gelf journald json-file local splunk syslog
 CDI spec directories:
  /etc/cdi
  /var/run/cdi
 Swarm: inactive
 Runtimes: io.containerd.runc.v2 runc
 Default Runtime: runc
 Init Binary: docker-init
 containerd version: fcd43222d6b07379a4be9786bda52438f0dd16a1
 runc version: d842d7719497cc3b774fd71620278ac9e17710e0
 init version: 
 Security Options:
  seccomp
   Profile: builtin
  cgroupns
 Kernel Version: 6.6.116-0-virt
 Operating System: Alpine Linux v3.22
 OSType: linux
 Architecture: aarch64
 CPUs: 4
 Total Memory: 15.59GiB
 Name: lima-rancher-desktop
 ID: 1f8180cd-5f5d-45dc-bfc7-7b68d1359f59
 Docker Root Dir: /var/lib/docker
 Debug Mode: false
 Experimental: false
 Insecure Registries:
  ::1/128
  127.0.0.0/8
 Live Restore Enabled: false
 Firewall Backend: iptables

Additional Info

This "feature" has some laughable behaviour, like this:

$ docker images | pbcopy
WARNING: This output is designed for human readability. For machine-readable output, please use --format.

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