routestxtlike

Routestxtlike denotes a family of plain-text formats used to describe routing information in networks and route-planning tools. It is not a single formal standard, but a style that favors human readability and easy parsing by scripts. In routestxtlike formats, each routing entry appears on its own line, comments can be included, and field separators vary (spaces, tabs, or commas). The emphasis is a lightweight, editable interchange representation that can be produced by configuration tools and consumed by routers, simulators, or planners.

Typical entries specify a destination network and one or more attributes such as the next-hop, the outgoing interface, and a metric or cost. Common fields include destination, next hop or interface, and metric; additional fields may carry protocol, policy flags, or route type. Variants differ in field order and naming, and may use plain tokens, CSV, or key=value pairs. The simplest form resembles: 10.0.0.0/8 via 192.0.2.1 dev eth0 metric 20. Comments start with a hash and are ignored by parsers.

Routestxtlike formats are used in educational contexts, lightweight network tools, and routing simulations where an easy-to-edit text representation is valuable. They are not universally standardized, but they provide a pragmatic bridge between human-readable route definitions and machine-interpretable data structures. See also routes.txt, routing table, and simple network data formats.