Recfiles

recfiles is a file format for human-editable, plain text databases.

Databases using this file format can be edited using any text editor. Recfiles allow for basic relational database operations, such as typing, auto-incrementing, as well as a simple join operation.

Recutils is a collection of tools, like recfmt, recsel, and rec2csv used to work with recfile databases. Various software libraries support the format.

Syntax
Data are stored in text files with empty lines separating records. Fields within a record are lines starting with their name and a colon; it is possible to wrap long entries. Multiple record types can be maintained in a single text file.

Example
This example command would output the following three lines (of the two original entries, one having two authors):