Each invocation of recins adds one record to the targeted
database. The fields comprising the records are specified using pairs
of -f and -v command line arguments. For example, this
is how we would add the first entry to a previously empty contacts
database:
$ recins -f Name -v "Mr Foo" -f Email -v foo@bar.baz contacts.rec $ cat contacts.rec Name: Mr. Foo Email: foo@bar.baz
If we invoke recins again on the same database we will be adding a
second record:
$ recins -f Name -v "Mr Bar" -f Email -v bar@gnu.org contacts.rec $ cat contacts.rec Name: Mr. Foo Email: foo@bar.baz name: Mr. Bar Email: bar@gnu.org
There is no limit on the number of -f -v pairs that can
be specified to recins, other than any limit on command line arguments
which may be imposed by the shell.
The field values provided using -v are encoded to follow the
rec format conventions, including multi-line field values.
Consider the following example:
$ recins -f Name -v "Mr. Foo" -f Address -v ' Foostrs. 19 Frankfurt am Oder Germany' contacts.rec $ cat contacts.rec Name: Mr. Foo Address: + Foostrs. 19 + Frankfurt am Oder + Germany
It is also possible to provide fields already encoded as rec data for
their addition, using the -r command line argument. This
argument can be intermixed with -f -v.
$ recins -f Name -v "Mr. Foo" -r "Email: foo@bar.baz" contacts.rec $ cat contacts.rec Name: Mr. Foo Email: foo@bar.baz
If the string passed to -r is not valid rec data then
recins will complain with an error and the operation will be
aborted.
At this time, it is not possible to add new records containing comments.