Recfiles
recfiles is a file format for human-editable, plain text databases.[1][2] Databases using this file format can be edited using any text editor. recfiles allow for basic relational database operations, typing, auto-incrementing, as well as a simple join operation.
| Filename extension |
.rec |
|---|---|
| Type of format | Data interchange |
| Open format? | yes |
| Website | https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ |
Recutils is a collection of tools, like recfmt, recsel, and rec2csv used to work with recfile databases.[3] Various software libraries support the format.[4][5][6]
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
Calling recsel -e 'Year > "1900"' -p Author on this example would output the following two entries:
Author: Doug McIlroy
Author: Dale Dougherty
Author: Tim O'Reilly
References
- Jose E. Marchesi (2020-01-30). "GNU Recutils Manual".
- James Tomasino (2020-01-26). "GNU Recutils". Retrieved 2020-02-09.
- https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/
- František Kučera (2019-04-08). "Relational pipes and GNU Recutils".
- https://github.com/maninya/python-recutils/
- https://github.com/aisamanra/rrecutils/