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Using DuckDB as a Unix Tool

DuckDB's CLI client is portable to many platforms and architectures. It handles CSV files conveniently and offers users the same rich SQL syntax everywhere. These characteristics make DuckDB an ideal tool to complement traditional Unix tools for data processing in the command line.

We solve several problems requiring operations such as projection and filtering to demonstrate the differences between using SQL queries in DuckDB versus specialized command line tools. In the following, we give examples for implementing simple data processing tasks using the CLI tools provided in most Unix shells and using DuckDB SQL queries. In this post, we used DuckDB as a standalone CLI application, and explored its abilities to complement or substitute existing command line tools ( sort, grep, comm, join, etc.).

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