-l selftest should display current power on/lifetime hours

[Matthias Hörmann]

The LifeTime(hours) column in the smartctl -l selftest output would be much more useful if the output also displayed the current value for this, allowing the user to see how long ago the tests actually ran. Instead, currently one has to look at the output of e.g. smartctl -a to check the power on hours manually before that column is of any use other than as a relative time between different tests in the log.

[Christian Franke]

Changing a long standing output format may break existing scripts which parse the output.

The POH value from ATA SMART Attributes (which are not part of any standard) is vendor specific and occasionally unreliable. POH from ATA Device Statistics (smartctl -l devstat, included in -x but not -a) is more reliable but still not widely supported.

So this ticket will possibly be resolved as wontfix.

smartctl -a to check the power on hours ...

Note that option -a is outdated because it only displays legacy SMART info, use -x instead.

[Alex Samorukov]

As now we do have a json i think we can close this ticket. It is very easy with tools like jq to get exact output format you are looking for, without changing the code and breaking other tools.