Depends on how complex the expected operations are. I think awk is absolutely essential for dealing with things like logfiles. Do you have a reason against usin

Depends on how complex the expected operations are. I think awk is absolutely essential for dealing with things like logfiles. Do you have a reason against using sqlite[1]? That works just fine in the console, doesn't need a server. You could still use awk with it, technically. For example: bash..$ sqlite3 books.sqlite sqlite$ create table books ( title varchar(128), author varchar(128) ); sqlite$ insert into books (title, author) values ("Snow Crash", "Neal Stephenson"); sqlite$ .quit bash..$ echo "select * from books;" | sqlite3 books.sqlite Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson [1] http://sqlite.org/ http://sqlite.org/