NAME

recs - Record Stream Manipulation and output

ABSTRACT

App::RecordStream - System for commandline analysis of data

SYNPOSIS

A set of programs for creating, manipulating, and outputing a stream of Records, or JSON hashes. Inspired by Monad.

DESCRIPTION

The recs system consists of 3 basic sets of scripts. Input scripts responsible for generating streams of record objects, Manipulation scripts responsible for analyzing, select, and manipulating records, and output scripts which take record streams and produce output for humans. These scripts can interface with other systems to retrieve data, parse existing files, or just regex out some values from a text stream.

KEY SPECS

Many of the scripts below take key arguments to specify or assign to a key in a record. Almost all of the places where you can specify a key (which normally means a first level key in the record), you can instead specify a key spec.

A key spec may be nested, and may index into arrays. Use a '/' to nest into a hash and a '#NUM' to index into an array (i.e. #2)

An example is in order, take a record like this:

{"biz":["a","b","c"],"foo":{"bar 1":1},"zap":"blah1"}
{"biz":["a","b","c"],"foo":{"bar 1":2},"zap":"blah2"}
{"biz":["a","b","c"],"foo":{"bar 1":3},"zap":"blah3"}

In this case a key spec of 'foo/bar 1' would have the values 1,2, and 3 respectively.

Similarly, 'biz/#0' would have the value of 'a' for all 3 records

You can also prefix key specs with '@' to engage the fuzzy matching logic

Matching works like this in order, first key to match wins 1. Exact match ( eq ) 2. Prefix match ( m/^/ ) 3. Match anywehre in the key (m//)

So, in the above example '@b/#2', the 'b' portion would expand to 'biz' and 2 would be the index into the array, so all records would have the value of 'c'

Simiarly, @f/b would have values 1, 2, and 3

SCRIPTS

Input Generation

recs-fromcsv

Produces records from a csv file/stream

recs-fromdb

Produces records for a db table, or from a SELECT statment into a db.

recs-fromre

Matches input streams against a regex, puts capture groups into hashes

recs-frommultire

Matches input streams against several regexs, puts capture groups into the record

recs-fromsplit

Splits input stream on a delimeter

recs-fromps

Generate records from the process tree

recs-fromatomfeed

Produces records for an optionally paginated atom feed.

recs-fromxml

Produces records for an XML document.

recs-fromkv

Produces records from input streams containing loosely formed key/value pairs

recs-fromtcpdump

Produces records from packet capture files (.pcap) as made by tcpdump

Stream Manipulation

recs-annotate

Annotate records with common fields, will memoize additions to speed up common annotations

recs-collate

Perforce aggregation operations on records. Group by a field, get an average, sum, corellation, etc. Very powerful

recs-delta

Transform values into deltas between adjacent records

recs-eval

Eval a string of perl against each record

recs-flatten

Flatten records of input to one level

recs-grep

Select records for which a string of perl evaluates to true.

recs-normalizetime

Based on a time field, tag records with a normalized time, i.e. every 5 minute buckets

recs-join

Perform an inner join of two record streams. Associate records in one stream with another stream.

recs-sort

Sort records based on keys, may specify multiple levels of sorting, as well as numerical or lexical sort ordering

recs-topn

Outputs the top n records. You may segment the input based on a list of keys such that unique values of keys are treated as distinct input streams. This enables top n listings per value groupings.

recs-xform

Perform a block of perl on each record, which may modify the record, Record is then output

recs-generate

Perform a block of perl on each record to generate a record stream, which is then output with a chain link back to the original record.

Output Generation

recs-todb

Inserts records into a DBI supported SQL database. Will crate a local sqlite database by default

recs-tocsv

Generates correctly quoted CSV files from record streams.

recs-tognuplot

Create a graph of field values in a record using GNU Plot.

recs-totable

Pretty prints a table of results.

recs-tohtml

Prints out an html table of the record stream

recs-toprettyprint

Prettily prints records, one key to a line, great for making sense of very large records

recs-toptable

Prints a multi-dimensional (pivot) table of values. Very powerful.

NOTES

The data stream format of the recs scripts is JSON hashes separated by new lines. If you wish to write your own recs script in your own language, just get a JSON parser and you should be good to go. The recs scripts use JSON::Syck, a fast xs-binding of a c implementation of a YAML parser/outputer

EXAMPLES

# look in the access log for all accesses with greater than 5 seconds, display in a table
cat access.log | recs-fromre --fieds ip,time '^(\d+).*TIME: (\d+)' | recs-grep '$r->{time} > 5' | recs-totable

SEE ALSO

Each of the recs-* scripts discussed have a --help mode available to print out usage and examples for the particular script, See that documentation for detailed information on the operation of each of the scripts. Also see some other man pages:

recs-examples(3) - A set of simple recs examples
recs-story(3) - A humorous introduction to RecordStream

AUTHORS

 Benjamin Bernard <perlhacker@benjaminbernard.com>
 Keith Amling <keith.amling@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2007 by Benjamin Bernard and Keith Amling This software is released under the MIT license