A set of commands for manipulating flat-text databases from the shell
Description
FSDB is a package of commands for manipulating flat-ASCII databases from
shell scripts. FSDB is useful to process medium amounts of data (with
very little data you'd do it by hand, with megabytes you might want a
real database). FSDB is very good at doing things like:
- extracting measurements from experimental output
- re-examining data to address different hypotheses
- joining data from different experiments
- eliminating/detecting outliers
- computing statistics on data (mean, confidence intervals,
correlations, histograms)
- reformatting data for graphing programs
Rather than hand-code scripts to do each special case, FSDB provides
higher-level functions than one gets with raw perl or shell scripts.
(Some features: control uses names instead of column numbers,
it is self-documenting, and is robust with good error and memory handling.)
