dbview - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

dbview - View dBase III files

SYNOPSIS

dbview [-b|--browse] [-d delim| --delimiter delim] [-D|--deleted] [-e|--description]
[-h|--help] [-i|--info] [-o|--omit] [-v|--version] [-r|--reserve] [-t|--trim] dbfile

DESCRIPTION

Dbview is a little tool that will display dBase III files. You can also use it to convert
your old .dbf files for further use with Unix. It should also work with dBase IV files,
but this is mostly untested.

By default dbview displays the contents of a dBase III or IV database file. This is be
done by displaying both the name of the field itself and its value. At the end of every
record a newline is appended.

OPTIONS

If no option given dbview only displays the database in its most friendly way.

--browse, -b
switches into browse mode. Using this mode no fieldnames will be displayed,
instead every record will displayed in one line using a delimiter to separate
fields.

--delimiter, -d delimiter
The default delimiter in browse mode is the colon sign ``:''. This parameter
overrides it. This can be useful especially if you plan to examine the output with
scripts.

--deleted, -D
displays deleted records as well as the delete state in each record in the
database.

--description, -e
displays the field description of the database.

--help, -h
displays a complete (or short) help screen.

--info, -i
displays some (partially technical) information about the database like number of
records and length of each record.

--omit, -o
omits displaying the whole database. Using this parameter can be useful if you're
only interested in the structure.

--reserve, -r
Normally fieldnames are converted into a more friendly format. They are stored in
capital letters, but that looks like shouting. This parameter supresses the
conversion.

--trim, -t
When this option is specified, leading and trailing spaces are omitted. This might
be useful when in browse mode.

--version, -v
displays version and exits.

NOTES

As dBase is DOS, umlauts are stored using a different code table (namely ASCII) than most
modern unices (namely ANSI). If you encounter such a file, I would recommend piping the
output through recode(1) with ibmpc:latin1 as it's argument.

If you want to examine the output generated by the browse mode, just take cut(1) and set
its delimiter to the used delimiter or take awk(1) and continue.

COPYRIGHT

Dbview is free software. It is based on routines from unknown source that I found on
nic.funet.fi in /pub/msdos/languages/c as dbase.c. The file contained the following
notice:

These functions are provided by Valour Software as a gift.

I have modified and included this file and wrote a skeleton around it. All together
provides a powerful tool for dBase III and IV database manipulation under Unix.

I mainly have written this program, because I've got several dbase files containing
important information for me. As I won't go running DOS everytime I need some of the
stored information, I had to find a viewer that runs unter Unix, resp. Linux, but
unfortunately didn't find one. So it was my turn.

This package as a whole is published under the GNU Public License, which is a great
invention.

It wasn't the intention to write a freaking viewer and reinvent the wheel again. Instead
dbview is intend to be used in conjunction with your favourite unix text utilities like
cut, recode and more.

Martin Schulze
Infodrom Oldenburg
[email protected]

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