[help-recutils] Relational pipes and GNU Recutils

[František Kučera]

Hello,

I am the author of Relational pipes 
<https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/> and in the latest 
development version v0.11 
<https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/v_0/release-v0.11.xhtml> I 
have added support for input and output in the recfile format. So our 
tools should be compatible now :-) (I hope; there might be bugs of 
course). I would appreciate any feedback, bug reports, ideas etc.

What might be interesting from Recutils users perspective:

1) relpipe-in-filesystem a tool that reads filesystem metadata (like 
names, paths, sizes, extended attributes), so you can do e.g.

find /etc/ssh/ -print0 | relpipe-in-filesystem | relpipe-out-recfile | 
recsel -e 'size > 390 && size < 1500'

or build some logic on the structure of your files and directories 
(filesystem itself can be seen as a database).

2) Convert even complex XML files to the recfile format. There is an 
example how to read an Atom feed: 
<https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/v_0/examples-xquery-atom.xhtml>

3) Convert data from big relational databases to the recfile format. 
Example is here: 
<https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/v_0/examples-recfile.xhtml>

4) Use relpipe-out-nullbyte as a safe way how to pass structured data to 
a shell script.

5) relpipe-out-tabular for printing tables in the terminal

6) relpipe-out-ods for output in LibreOffice Calc format (unlike CSV it 
supports multiple relations / record types)

Franta