I finally figured out how to load multiple "dot commands" or settings from the command line tool. (Some users only have the default binary to rely on, ya know.) Since I have never found this information on the web before, I thought I would post it here to share the information.
To load options before doing the query, they have to be separated from the query by a hard return, in the quoted string itself. So: > sqlite3 -header -column tmp.db ".width 5 30; select * from data;" doesn't really change the column widths. But, doing this does: > echo ".width 5 30\n select * from data;" | sqlite3 -header -column tmp.db To load multiple options, you have to put them on different lines, with the query on the last line: > echo ".width 5 30\n.timeout 15000\n select * from data;" | sqlite3 -header -column tmp.db Some systems I have tried this on /required /only a single hard return after the last option, with a semicolon between the multiple settings. Others required the hard returns without any semicolons. Experiment on your own platform/binary version. I don't know which versions/flavors this works on, but it works for me finally. Note: Your version of echo has to support turning '\n' into a hard return. Not all do. If not, you can do something like a perl -e to do it as well. All the examples on websites show applying the dot commands from a sqlite> prompt. Doing the hard returns within the string makes it look like a user typing the commands in, with the hard returns. If anyone could fix the parser in the sqlite3 source code, I'm sure many novices would greatly appreciate it. The above trick has eluded me for several months of working with sqlite3 from the command line, and is still cumbersome, although usable now. One other trick is to put the options in a .sqliterc file in your home directory, one dot command per line. This works, but is not really feasible in an environment where it will run on multiple hosts and you don't control other accounts that will run it. Also, you can't pick and choose which ones are loaded. They are global settings at that point. I hope this helps someone out there looking for this, as well as possibly getting the parser fixed to make it easier to use in the future. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
