4 ms·

I'm really quite reluctant to touch it at all; on my Arch machine the installation will take up 366.38 MiB (including dependencies), which feels horribly bloate

• michaelmrose 7y ago
  It does have a cli calibredb BUT it really isn't designed for interactive use and comes with a few caveats. You need to pass --for-machine to get json output. It keeps all its data in a sqlite database. Its built in cli refuses to interact with the database even for read only operations when calibre is running. You CAN pass a flag to interact with the running instance but THAT will fail if it isn't running so you basically have to see if its running to see how you ought to talk to it. Talking to the running instance over localhost is subject to the same limitations as talking to a remote instance. In particular it returns $format in place of /path/to/book.$format a limitation the author says is for security. Since the naming structure is consistent you can replace format with /path/to/library///.format when talking to the running instance. Realistically worrying about 400MB for an app when 1TB ssds are cheap seems a contextually odd choice. Calibre does a LOT and actually does it pretty well. Replicating even just the most important functions would appear to be a fair bit of work.