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Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

Is that better than:

  cut -d, -f1,3 data.csv | grep -v '^foo'

I'm sure there are some things where you need sql/q, but this isn't one of them, and there is a lot of utility in productive with bare POSIX tools.

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Expressing an 'or' or having any logic to the condition becomes quickly annoying with usual *nix tools, and most people use SQL much more often than they forget how to use sed and awk.

egrep '(a|b)'

If always splitting on ',' is correct for your data, then your solution is probably fine. You probably want '^foo,' though, otherwise yours includes things where 'foo' is just a prefix of the first column value.

But CSV permits quoted fields that contain literal ','. So in that case, splitting on ',' would be incorrect.

This breaks down when you have commas in your CSV data like if you had something like locations as the quoted string "Atlanta, GA"

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