The simplest way of editing a recfile is to start your favourite text editor and hack the contents of the file as desired. However, the rec format is structured enough so recfiles can be updated automatically by programs. This is useful for writing shell scripts or when there are complex data integrity rules stored in the file that we want to be sure to preserve.
The following sections discuss the usage of the recutils for altering recfiles in the level of record: adding new records, deleting or commenting them out, sorting them, etc.