structured-text-tools VS miller

This works well in scripts and logs of all the commands you need to do to reproduce the current state of the system from a scratch install. Also can be used with diff -u and patch, sed, perl, and awk oneliners and structured text tools. You can also capture most of the commands using sudo logging feature but it won't capture the here documents. But for modest size files you can use newlines in echo commands. Note that commands which use redrection should use something like ~~~~ sudo bash -c "echo 'foo' >>file.txt" ~~~~ instead of "sudo echo foo >>file.txt" or "echo foo | sudo tee -a file.txt

TFA is about how to handle csv files with awk. This might be useful in straightforward cases.

For all others I’d recommend to have a look at

https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools

which lists tools to handle structure text formats

in general, I'd pick something from https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools

Also, here is a list of structured text tools. You may find some tools there that are helpful in editing configuration files from the command line. Or you can use "diff -u" to create a patch file (you need to save the patch files along with sudo.log) to recreate. Also, use sfdisk --dump and sfdisk --backup to save partition information in a form that can be used to recreate backups.

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