4.1 Inserting Records

Adding new records to a recfile is pretty trivial: open it with your text editor and just write down the fields comprising the records. This is really the best way to add contents to a recfile containing simple data. However, complex databases may introduce some difficulties:

Multi-line values.

It can be tedious to manually encode the several lines.

Data integrity.

It is difficult to manually maintain the integrity of data stored in the data base.

Counters and timestamps.

Some record sets feature auto-generated fields, which are commonly used to implement counters and time-stamps. See Auto-Generated Fields.

Thus, to facilitate the insertion of new data a command line utility called recins is included in the recutils. The usage of recins is very simple, and can be used both in the command line or called from another program. The following subsections discuss several aspects of using this utility.

• Adding Records With recins: Basics of the recins utility.
• Replacing Records With recins: Substituting records in a file.
• Adding Anonymous Records: Inserting or replacing records with no type.