As mentioned above, the command recins adds new records to a
recfile, but it cannot
add fields to an existing record.
This task can be achieved automatically using recset with its -a flag.
Suppose that (after a stock inspection) you wanted to add an ‘Inspected’ field to all the items in the recfile. The following command could be used.
$ recset -t Item -f Inspected -a 'Yes' stock.rec
Here, because no record selection flag was provided, the command affected all the
records of type ‘Item’.
We could limit the effect of the command using the -e, -q,
-n or -m flags.
For example to add the ‘Inspected’ field to only the first item the following command
would work:
$ recset -t Item -n 0 -f Inspected -a 'Yes' stock.rec
Similarly, a selection expression could have been used with the -e flag in order to
add the field only to records which satisfy the expression.
If you use recset with the -a flag on a field that already exists, a
new field (in addition to those already present) will be appended with the given value.