Command Line Tools for Apache Feather Files

Stand-alone Unix shell command line tools for Apache's .feather formatted files:

- fless
- ftail
- fwc (-l)
- f2csv

Each tool operates in the spirit of the analogous Unix shell command. Only the most basic uses of these original Unix tools are suported in their f version. For example, the fwc command operates like wc -l, i.e. it displays the number of data rows. But wc -c is not provided.

Installation

The recommended installation is via pipx, which is designed to install shell level command line tools. It will create a $HOME/.local/bin directory if it does not exist. The commands fless, ftail, etc. will reside there. The pipx installation offers to add the location to the OS PATH by adding an entry in the shell config file.

- pip install pipx
- pipx install feather-tools

Usage

fless

fless <fpath>

Shows one screenful of the .feather file at a time. The number of rows displayed is determined by the terminal in which the command is issued. At the end of each displayed page, type a single character:

• To show the next page: spacebar, or \n, or the character n
• Back one page: b
• Back to beginning (page 0): s
• To the last page: e
• For help: h
• To quit the display: q

ftail <fpath> [(-n | --lines) n]

Displays the last n rows of the .feather file. Default is the lesser of 10, and the length of the data.

NOTE: Starts the row display with the logical (i.e. terminal-height) page that contains the first line specified by the tail default or in the --lines argument. So a few more rows than requested may be displayed at the top.

fwc <fpath>

Is analogout to the Unix wc -l, and shows the number of data rows, not counting the column header.

f2csv <src-fpath> [<dst-fpath>]

Writes a .csv file that contains the .feather data. Default separator is comma. Default output is stdout.

The command line arguments are as in the Pandas df.to_csv() documentation. This means that the index keyword is True by default, while index_label is None. Which leads to ugly .csv like:

,foo,bar,fum
Row0,1,2,3
Row1,4,5,6
Row2,7,8,9

Where the Rown are the dataframe index. Note the orphan comma in the header. To fix (same as with df.to_csv()):

f2csv --index=true --index_label=Rows file.feather

Rows,foo,bar,fum
Row0,1,2,3
Row1,4,5,6
Row2,7,8,9

or:

f2csv --index=false file.feather

foo,bar,fum
1,2,3
4,5,6
7,8,9

If you clone this repo to make changes: all Python imports are relative to <proj-root>/src. So ensure that your $PYTHONPATH includes that directory.

Testing

To test the code, clone this repo, and install the test dependency:

pip install .[test]
pytest