A dumb key/value store implemented in awk & plain-text files

To install, make sure kv.awk is executable

chmod +x kv.awk

and drop kv.awk in your $PATH.

Or don't. You can invoke it by full path too.

You also can drop kv.awk-completion.bash in your /etc/bash_completion.d/ or source it in your ~/.bashrc to get the completion work.

You can also run

sudo make install

to install both the executable and the completion script.

Usage:

$ kv.awk <storename> <command> [args]

For the examples below, I use a storename of "example" which will get stored in example.txt

To add a key use add (or set):

$ kv.awk example add mykey "this is my value"

To list all the keys & values use list (or ls):

$ kv.awk example list

To get the value of a particular key "mykey"

$ kv.awk example get mykey

To get the value of multiple keys:

$ kv.awk example get mykey1 mykey2

If you set a new value for an existing key, it will overwrite it:

$ kv.awk example add mykey "my first value"
$ kv.awk example get mykey
my first value
$ kv.awk example add mykey "my second value"
$ kv.awk example get mykey
my second value

To delete a key use delete (or del or rm):

$ kv.awk example delete mykey

To delete the value of multiple keys:

$ kv.awk example delete mykey1 mykey2

kv.awk stores data in $HOME/.config/kv.awk/<storename>.txt as a tab-delimited file unless $HOME is unset in which case it uses the current directory.

Newlines in the key or value will break things but in predictable ways.

Empty lines, lines without a tab, and lines beginning with a "#" are ignored but will get overwritten/removed the next time the data-store is changed.

Data is not guaranteed to stay in the same order.

It doesn't do any locking, so concurrent access attempts might completely hose your data. So don't do that.

Inspired by @JuanIbiapina's shelf which was written in Rust. So I decided to give it a try in awk to see how it would go. However, I did change the parameter order from "[command] [storename]" to "[storename] [command]" because I found that easier to work with.

If you want to get debug output, set the $DEBUG environment variable to "y"

$ DEBUG=y kv.awk add example mykey myvalue