Re: ENHANCEMENT: using the header from a delimited file

[Matt Oates (Home)]

On 15 December 2011 21:36, Ole Tange <ole@tange.dk> wrote:
> As it is now, you can run:
>
>       parallel -a table_file.tsv --skip-first-line --colsep '\t' cmd
> -o {1} -i {2}
>
> I see very little benefit in adding the extra option, so you need to
> show me better examples where this could be helpful. It will also help
> if others can provide these examples.
>
>> Computational Biology - Stowers Institute for Medical Research
>
> I suspect you need it for some bioinformatics, if so feel free to show
> what bioinformatics files you need it for.

Maintainability of code that deals with database dumps where the
column orderings could be altered (such as adding a single new field)
is a good and common example. Instead of relying on column order you
can refer to each field by its label, this is also a lot more readable
too.