miller VS tsv-utils

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.

worth giving Miller a shot

CSV utilities (still haven't pick a favorite one...): https://github.com/harelba/q https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv https://github.com/wireservice/csvkit https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

If you need just csv/tsv parsing, you can also take a look at https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils

You might want to look at tsv-utils, or a similar project: https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils

For the SQL part, but maybe a lot heavier, you can use one of the projects listed on this page: https://github.com/multiprocessio/dsq (No longer maintained, but has links to lots of other projects)

TSV is most often a better format than CSV. Localization, in particular, is a nightmare with CSV.

For anything down and dirty, what's wrong with -F'"'? For anything fancy there are plenty of things like the below.

eBay's TSV Utilities: Command line tools for large, tabular data files. Filtering, statistics, sampling, joins and more.

includes csv to tsv: https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils

HT: https://simonwillison.net/

As an example, eBay's tsv-utils took full advantage of the GC and performed better than existing programs that had been hand-optimized in C etc.

tsv-utils - Command line csv data manipulation toolkit. D

In the majority of cases you'll be better off with Tab Separated Values over Comma Separated Values. More info here.

May well be overkill for your needs, but I'm a fan of tsv-utils It's fast and enormously flexible, and seems to me a "best of breed" toolset for data mining CSV files (that is what it was written for). https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils