Mucking around with CSV files in command-line is painful. Been there, done that, got annoyed by many limitations of that approach, bit the bullet and learned R

Mucking around with CSV files in command-line is painful. Been there, done that, got annoyed by many limitations of that approach, bit the bullet and learned R. It is somewhat weird language, but it was one of the best decisions I ever made in my professional career: now it is my go-to tool for data analysis and plotting. CSV data is easily imported into R where you can easily analyze it, transform it, plot it -- everything from a unified command-line interface (there also exist GUIs, but I haven't used them). reshape and plyr packages are worth learning too. There's also an emacs package for interacting with R (ESS), and it significantly eases interaction; works also under Win, and is what I use in my work with R. TL;DR: nice project, but it's a toy compared to what you can get from R. (Re unix philosophy: I'm the type of person that likes to get the job done and I therefore very often choose pragmatism over idealism.)