SQLite dot commands: run system shell commands

Shell dot command

If you are in middle of a sqlite shell session, and you don't want to quit the shell to run arbitrary shell command, you can simply use the .shell <command> to execute any shell commands right from within the sqlite shell. How handy is this!

.shell echo "hello, world!"

That is a lame example, but it shows you the power of the .shell command.

Let's say I want to run a golang project, I can do this:

.shell go run main.go

Its helpful if you want to do something but you don't want to quit the shell to do that:

• look up few files/datapoints from the local filesystem,
• run scripts to populate data
• populate database and then reopen the db shell

This is are the things that I have stumbled upon, so far. Need more experience to see if there are more.