recfiles is a

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

for human-editable,

plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects ( floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a limi ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

s. Databases using this file format can be edited using any

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be u ...

. recfiles allow for basic

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

operations, typing, auto-incrementing, as well as a simple join operation. Recutils is a collection of tools, like ''recfmt'', ''recsel'', and ''rec2csv'' used to work with recfile databases. Various software libraries support the format.

Syntax

Data are stored in text files with empty lines separating records. Fields within a record are lines starting with their name and a colon; it is possible to wrap long entries. Multiple record types can be maintained in a single text file.

Example

# This is a recfile document. %rec: Texts %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 This example command would output the following three lines (of the two original entries, one having two authors): $ recsel -e 'Year > "1900"' -p Author Author: Doug McIlroy Author: Dale Dougherty Author: Tim O'Reilly

References

Computer file formats Computer-related introductions in 2010 Data serialization formats Lightweight markup languages Open formats {{software-stub

Syntax

Example

See also

References