NAME

App::RecordStream - recs - A system for command-line analysis of data

SYNOPSIS

A set of programs for creating, manipulating, and outputting a stream of Records, or JSON hashes. Inspired by Monad.

INSTALLATION

Quick, standalone bundle

The quickest way to start using recs is via the minimal, standalone bundle:

curl -fsSL https://recs.pl > recs
chmod +x recs
./recs --help

This is also known as the "fatpacked" recs.

From CPAN

You can also install recs from CPAN as App::RecordStream:

cpanm --interactive App::RecordStream

Using cpanm in interactive mode will prompt you for optional feature support. Other CPAN clients such as cpan and cpanp also work fine, but you can't opt to use any optional features (just like cpanm in non-interactive mode). A kitchen-sink install of App::RecordStream looks like:

cpanm --with-recommends --with-all-features App::RecordStream

If you don't have cpanm itself, you can install it easily with:

curl -fsSL https://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus

DESCRIPTION

The recs system consists of three basic sets of commands:

• Input commands responsible for generating streams of record objects
• Manipulation commands responsible for analyzing, selecting, and manipulating records
• Output commands responsible for taking record streams and producing output for humans or other programs

These commands can interface with other systems to retrieve data, parse existing files, or just regex out some values from a text stream.

Commands are run using recs command [options and arguments]. If you're using a CPAN-based install, you may also run commands directly as recs-command, though this is no longer recommended for forwards compatibility. Both installation methods provide a top-level recs executable which dispatches to commands, so this is the preferred invocation style.

The core recs commands are briefly summarized below, and you can list all available commands by running recs --list.

To read more about each command, run recs command --help. Longer documentation is available as recs command --help-all or perldoc recs-command. For example, to read more about "fromcsv", you might run any of the following:

recs fromcsv --help
recs fromcsv --help-all
perldoc recs-fromcsv

COMMANDS

Input Generation

• fromcsv

  Produces records from a csv file/stream

• fromdb

  Produces records for a db table, or from a SELECT statement into a db.

• fromre

  Matches input streams against a regex, puts capture groups into hashes

• frommongo

  Generate a record stream from a MongoDB query.

• frommultire

  Matches input streams against several regexes, puts capture groups into the record

• fromsplit

  Splits input stream on a delimiter

• fromps

  Generate records from the process tree

• fromatomfeed

  Produces records for an optionally paginated atom feed.

• fromxml

  Produces records for an XML document.

• fromkv

  Produces records from input streams containing loosely formed key/value pairs

• fromtcpdump

  Produces records from packet capture files (.pcap) as made by tcpdump

Stream Manipulation

• annotate

  Annotate records with common fields, will memoize additions to speed up common annotations

• collate

  Perforce aggregation operations on records. Group by a field, get an average, sum, correlation, etc. Very powerful

• delta

  Transform values into deltas between adjacent records

• eval

  Eval a string of Perl against each record

• flatten

  Flatten records of input to one level

• grep

  Select records for which a string of Perl evaluates to true.

• multiplex

  Take records, grouped by keys, and run a separate recs command for each group.

• normalizetime

  Based on a time field, tag records with a normalized time, i.e. every 5 minute buckets

• join

  Perform an inner join of two record streams. Associate records in one stream with another stream.

• substream

  Filter to a range of matching records with paired Perl snippets --start and --end.

• sort

  Sort records based on keys, may specify multiple levels of sorting, as well as numerical or lexical sort ordering

• topn

  Outputs the top n records. You may segment the input based on a list of keys such that unique values of keys are treated as distinct input streams. This enables top n listings per value groupings.

• xform

  Perform a block of Perl on each record, which may modify the record, Record is then output

• generate

  Perform a block of Perl on each record to generate a record stream, which is then output with a chain link back to the original record.

Output Generation

• todb

  Inserts records into a DBI supported SQL database. Will create a local SQLite database by default

• tocsv

  Generates correctly quoted CSV files from record streams.

• tognuplot

  Create a graph of field values in a record using GNU Plot.

• totable

  Pretty prints a table of results.

• tohtml

  Prints out an HTML table of the record stream

• toprettyprint

  Prettily prints records, one key to a line, great for making sense of very large records

• toptable

  Prints a multi-dimensional (pivot) table of values. Very powerful.

KEY SPECS

Many of the commands above take key arguments to specify or assign to a key in a record. Almost all of the places where you can specify a key (which normally means a first level key in the record), you can instead specify a key spec.

A key spec may be nested, and may index into arrays. Use a / to nest into a hash and a #NUM to index into an array (i.e. #2)

An example is in order, take a record like this:

{"biz":["a","b","c"],"foo":{"bar 1":1},"zap":"blah1"}
{"biz":["a","b","c"],"foo":{"bar 1":2},"zap":"blah2"}
{"biz":["a","b","c"],"foo":{"bar 1":3},"zap":"blah3"}

In this case a key spec of foo/bar 1 would have the values 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

Similarly, biz/#0 would have the value of a for all 3 records

Fuzzy matching

You can also prefix key specs with @ to engage the fuzzy matching logic. Matching is tried like this, in order, with the first key to match winning:

• 1. Exact match (eq)
• 2. Prefix match (m/^/)
• 3. Match anywhere in the key (m//)

Given the above example data and the fuzzy key spec @b/#2, the b portion would expand to biz and 2 would be the index into the array, so all records would have the value of c.

Simiarly, @f/b would have values 1, 2, and 3.

WRITING YOUR OWN COMMANDS

The data stream format of the recs commands is JSON hashes separated by new lines. If you wish to write your own recs command in your own language, just get a JSON parser and you should be good to go. The recs commands use JSON::MaybeXS.

If you name your command as recs-mycommand and put it somewhere in your PATH environment variable, the recs command will dispatch to it when called as recs mycommand. It will also be included in recs --list output.

If you want to write your new command in Perl, you can use the same Perl API that the standard recs toolkit uses. See the various App::RecordStream::Operation subclasses. Once your new operation class is installed in perl's library paths, recs will find it automatically without the need for any executable command shim.

EXAMPLES

# look in the custom access log for all accesses with greater than 5 seconds,
# display in a table
cat access.log \
  | recs fromre --fields ip,time '^(\d+).*TIME: (\d+)' \
  | recs grep '$r->{time} > 5' \
  | recs totable

SEE ALSO

Each of the commands discussed have a --help mode available to print out usage and examples for the particular command. See that documentation for detailed information on the operation of each of the commands. Also see some other man pages:

• Run recs examples or see App::RecordStream::Manual::Examples for a set of simple recs examples
• Run recs story or see App::RecordStream::Manual::Story for a humorous introduction to RecordStream

AUTHORS

Benjamin Bernard perlhacker@benjaminbernard.com

Keith Amling keith.amling@gmail.com

Thomas Sibley tsibley@cpan.org

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2007–2017 by the AUTHORS

This software is released under the MIT and Artistic 1.0 licenses.