The only think I feel is missing is traditional SQL syntax. This makes it much harder to use as a drop-in replacement where someone would actually otherwise use the competitors mentioned on their homepage.

I think its real competition is SQLLite and JSON / YAML, and it definitely has some benefits over the text formats, it can't compare with SQLLite.

There are applications that let you query structured text with SQL. For example, https://github.com/dinedal/textql there are others as well.

networked

There is a lot of tools of this kind [1] but nearly all of them work with CSV or other delimiter-separated data. What made recutils stand out for me is that it has tools to modify files in place, not just select data from them, and its file format is different.

The rec format is interesting because it is a specification for what others have used before without one. It seems quite readable and does not suffer from the ",,,,,," problem of CSV.

[1] Here's the list of ones I have run into so far:

* https://github.com/harelba/q

* https://github.com/tobimensch/termsql

* https://github.com/samuel/squawk

* https://github.com/tjunier/sqawk

I've also written one: https://github.com/dbohdan/sqawk. It turned out I wasn't the only one to come up with the name.