GNU Recutils

There are hundreds of cool command line tools that have been made over the years built on the unix philosophy. Plain text is powerful, ubiquitous, and human-centric. It was also the only option for computing for quite a while. It’s no surprise that some of the most sophisticated tools are focused on it.

One such package is GNU Recutils, a set of tools and libraries to access human-editable, plain text databases called recfiles. Using plain text that is primarily human-readable as a database is just frankly cool as hell.

Recutils is a collection of tools, like recins, recdel, and recsel used to manage these recfiles/databases. They allow for all the normal basic relational database operations, typing, auto-incrementing, and even field-level crypto. All of this power is yours with the bonus that your database is a human-readable text file that you can grep/awk/sed freely, and a line-oriented structure makes it perfect for version control systems.

There’s other convenient tools, like the ability to convert to and from CSV formats, alternative output modes that make it work well with awk, password-protected fields, and so on. The package is quite robust and well maintained by Jose E. Marchesi, who can be found in the #recutils room on irc.freenode.net.

GNU Recutils’ official site

GNU Recutils documentation

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