csvtk VS miller

No problem. You might also be interested in csvtk https://github.com/shenwei356/csvtk from the same group. Very handy set of tools.

Hi guys, this is a shameless plug. I'd like to introduce my package for formatting text tables: https://github.com/shenwei356/stable. I've used it in a CSV/TSV toolkit, csvtk. you can try the pretty command.

I moved to csvtk and I am pretty happy with it. I find it a robust, feature rich, self-contained program.

csvtk - Command line csv data manipulation. Go

As an aside, I recently discovered the command-line program csvtk and it is really nice and useful. It helped me recently do a lot of stupid little tasks where I would have had to load the csv into LibreCalc and make some small manipulations.

I want to recommend csvtk for transform csv https://github.com/shenwei356/csvtk Also cut with -d and -f options can be used to filter fields.

I recently came across https://github.com/johnkerl/miller. I don't know how these tools compare.

The syntax for Miller isn't too complex and there's a ReadTheDocs website dedicated to the flags, verbs & functions and also hosts a bunch of FAQs & examples.

jq and miller[1] are essential parts of my toolbelt, right up there with awk and vim.

[1]: https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

> This works really well if your problem can be solved in one or two liners.

My personal comfort threshold is around the 100-line mark. It's even possible to write maintainable shell scripts up to 500 lines, but it mostly depends on the problem you're trying to solve, and the discipline of the programmer to follow best practices (use sane defaults, ShellCheck, etc.).

> It go bad very quickly when, say, you have two CSV files and want to join them the sql-way.

In that case we're talking about structured data, and, yeah, Perl or Python would be easier to work with. That said, depending on the complexity of the CSV, you can still go a long way with plain Bash with IFS/read(1) or tr(1) to split CSV columns. This wouldn't be very robust, but there are tools that handle CSV specifically[1], which can be composed in a shell script just fine.

So it's always a balancing act of being productive quickly with a shell script, or reaching out for a programming language once the tools aren't a good fit, or maintenance becomes an issue.

[1]: https://miller.readthedocs.io/

where mlr is from https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

if this class of problems (i.e., csv/tsv data) is your main target you may find miller (https://github.com/johnkerl/miller) much more useful in the long run

That said, you may be interested in Miller (https://github.com/johnkerl/miller) which provides similar capabilities for CSV, JSON, and XML files. It doesn't use a SQL grammar, but that's just the proverbial lipstick on the thing. I'm not the author, but I have used it and I see some parallels in use cases at the very least.