q

q is a command-line tool that brings SQL to text files. Rather than importing a CSV or TSV into a database first, you point q at the file and run a SELECT statement against it, treating delimited text as an actual table with columns named c1 through cN or taken from a header row.

It supports configurable delimiters, header handling and encodings, and can automatically cache data in a SQLite file so repeated queries on the same large file run faster. It can also query multi-file SQLite databases directly. The project website includes many examples, from simple selects to joins and analysis tasks, along with notes on limitations and the rationale for why existing Linux tools were not enough.

The tool is written in Python, uses SQLite internally and is released under the GPL-3.0 licence. It is installed locally and runs on your machine with no server. It suits developers, sysadmins and analysts who spend time in the terminal inspecting logs, exports and spreadsheets, and who would rather write SQL than chain awk, cut and sort commands.