-The output of the program is designed to interpreted as a shell
-fragment (or parsed as a *key=value* file). Options which extend the
-output (e.g. -p, -v) will output the additional information on stderr
-(such that the stdout is still parseable).
+The output of the program is designed either for human consumption (the
+default) or, when enabled with the ``--machine-readable`` option
+(described further below), for machine consumption. In the latter case,
+it is intended to interpreted as a shell fragment (or parsed as a
+*key=value* file). Options which extend the output (e.g. -p, -v) will
+output the additional information on stderr (such that the stdout is
+still parseable).