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## Usage

CSVfix is a command-line program that must be run via a command-line prompt. To use CSVfix you will need to open a Windows command prompt or a Linux/UNIX shell window.

The general form of the CSVfix command line is as follows:

csvfix command flags files

where:

- csvfix is the name of the CSVfix executable.
- command is one of the CSVfix commands listed in this manual
- flags is zero or more flags, each preceded by a hyphen, which are specific to the command. A few flags are not command-specific, and are described here.
- files is a list of zero or more files which provide input for the command

Here are some examples of CSVfix usage. There are many more examples in the alphabetic commands section of this manual.

csvfix help

csvfix help order

csvfix order -f 1,3,7 file.csv file2.csv

csvfix fileinfo -t -bc afile.dat

csvfix upper mydata.csv | csvfix order -f 3,1,2

Running CSVfix with no command-line parameters displays version, configuration and copyright information.

Commands can be abbreviated to their minimal non-ambiguous form, so the last command above could also have been written as:

csvfix up mydata.csv | csvfix or -f 3,1,2

Some command parameters may need to be quoted (for example, those containing spaces). If you are using the Windows CMD shell, you should normally use double-quotes for this, if you are using the Bash or similar shells, you should use single-quotes. The examples in this manual use single quotes because I use the Bash shell for all my work.

If no files are specified CSVfix reads its standard input. You can also force CSVfix to read standard input by using a hyphen as a file name. For example:

csvfix echo file1.dat - file2.dat

reads file1.dat, then standard input, then file2.dat.

CSVfix normally writes its output to standard output, unless the -o flag is used . This means that CSVfix can be used in pipelines and indeed this is one of the important means of using it; if it seems that one CSVfix command invocation cannot do the job, two (or possibly more), connected via pipes, almost certainly can.

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