CLI Overview

The alimentar command-line interface provides tools for data inspection, transformation, and management.

Installation

The CLI is included when you install alimentar with the cli feature (enabled by default):

cargo install alimentar

Or build from source:

cargo build --release --features cli

Commands

CommandDescription
infoDisplay dataset information (schema, row count, file size)
headDisplay first N rows of a dataset
schemaDisplay dataset schema in detail
viewInteractive TUI viewer for exploring datasets
convertConvert between data formats
registryDataset registry operations

Quick Examples

# Inspect a dataset
alimentar info data.parquet
alimentar head data.parquet -n 10
alimentar schema data.parquet

# Interactive exploration
alimentar view data.parquet
alimentar view data.csv --search "error"

# Format conversion
alimentar convert data.csv data.parquet
alimentar convert data.parquet data.json

Global Options

OptionDescription
-h, --helpPrint help information
-V, --versionPrint version information

Exit Codes

CodeMeaning
0Success
1General error
2Invalid arguments
3File not found
4Quality check failed

Supported Formats

The CLI supports the following data formats:

  • Parquet (.parquet) - Columnar storage format
  • Arrow IPC (.arrow, .ipc) - Arrow's native format
  • CSV (.csv) - Comma-separated values
  • JSON/JSONL (.json, .jsonl) - JSON and newline-delimited JSON