ShellQuery

Ever piped together some awful combination of grep, sed, awk, sort to run a quick-and-dirty analysis? Now you can do those same awful transformations using SQL! Many studies ^{[weasel words]} have shown that the aforementioned tools are difficult to use, and moreover, most people prefer SQL ^{[citation needed]}.

ShellQuery (shq) is a command line tool for running SQL against plain text. It lets you express logic in SQL instead of stringing together bash commands.

Usage

Suppose you're running a web server, and you want to get some quick stats on your traffic. Your logs look something like the following:

[pid: 2302|app: 0|req: 12/60] 127.0.0.1 () {38 vars in 569 bytes} [Sat Dec  6 21:19:12 2014] GET /posts/new => generated 5851 bytes in 960 msecs (HTTP/1.1 200) 4 headers in 124 bytes (1 switches on core 0)
[pid: 2304|app: 0|req: 18/61] 127.0.0.1 () {36 vars in 530 bytes} [Sat Dec  6 21:19:10 2014] GET /posts => generated 631 bytes in 3779 msecs (HTTP/1.1 200) 4 headers in 123 bytes (1 switches on core 0)
[pid: 2305|app: 0|req: 8/62] 127.0.0.1 () {36 vars in 538 bytes} [Sat Dec  6 21:19:17 2014] GET /posts/123 => generated 7757 bytes in 294 msecs (HTTP/1.1 200) 4 headers in 124 bytes (1 switches on core 0)

Awful bash to get requests by total time spent for all lines saying "generated X bytes in T msecs":

$ grep generated webserver.log | awk '{ sum[$18] += $24 } END { for (k in sum) { print sum[k], k; } }' | sort -n | tail
29 /error/style/black.css
535 /posts/9
609 /posts/99
720 /posts/1
737 /posts/123
806 /posts/3
1157 /posts/5
7579 /posts/new
7933 /posts/a
56594 /posts

Less awful SQL to do the same thing:

$ grep generated webserver.log | shq 'SUM(c24) AS s, c18 GROUP BY c18 ORDER BY s DESC LIMIT 10'
56594       /posts
7933        /posts/a
7579        /posts/new
1157        /posts/5
806 /posts/3
737 /posts/123
720 /posts/1
609 /posts/99
535 /posts/9
29  /error/style/black.css

Note that you may omit the SELECT and FROM clauses.

See shq -h for additional usage information.

Installing

• With pip: sudo pip install shellquery
• Manually: curl -o ~/bin/shq https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jingw/shellquery/master/shellquery.py && chmod +x ~/bin/shq

Python 3 is required.

Development testing

Commands:

python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r dev_requirements.txt
pytest