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.

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

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

See also

• asciidoc
• TOML
• org-mode

References

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