Another thought is to use the "message of the day" augeas lens (motd); this is the simplest possible augeas lens and it basically returns every line in the file as a row in the returned table. You can then use standard SQL to parse the lines. Unfortunately, you will have to modify the motd lens to have it parse files other than /etc/motd.

Ah, this sounds scary (a method to read the contents of any file). We should audit the current lenses and make sure this is not the case today. For example, we have a problem if there is a

/etc/secret/aws.key

, and the raw contents are returned in a column.