Recutils

Recutils, from GNU Project, is a free command-line toolset for performing basic relational database operations on plain text files^[2][3] – including field typing, auto-increment, and join. Storage files – known as recfiles – confirm to a file format defined by the toolset. As plain text, recfiles can be edited via a text editor (as long it supports the character encoding). Various other software libraries support the format.^[4][5][6]

A recfile is a text file with empty lines between records. Each field of a record is a line starting with the field name and a colon. Multiple record types can be in a single file. A long line can be wrapped (i.e. for readability).

Tools include:

• recsel – Search for and print fields from records matching a query
• recins – Insert a record, or replace existing records
• recdel – Delete a record, or delete a set of records
• recfix – Sort records
• recset – Add or update individual fields

The following is formatted as a recfile.

%rec: Text
%type: Year int

Author: Doug McIlroy
Year: 1964
Note: The Origin of Unix Pipes

Title: Unix Text Processing
Author: Dale Dougherty
Author: Tim O'Reilly
Year: 1987
Publisher: Hayden Books

Author: William Shakespeare
Title: Hamlet
Year: 1599
Year: 1600
Year: 1601

The following command selects records where a year field is greater than 1900 and outputs the author field values. The first two records have a year greater than 1900 so are selected. The first record has a single author and the second has two, so the result is three author names.

$ recsel -e 'Year > "1900"' -p Author
Author: Doug McIlroy
Author: Dale Dougherty
Author: Tim O'Reilly

• asciidoc – Human-readable document formatPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Flat-file database – Database stored as flat data
• org-mode – Open source mode for GNU Emacs
• TOML – Configuration file format

• Official website

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