3.2 Saving data to disk

• named query results can be stored on disk in the DataDirectory

  > set DataDirectory ".";
> DICKENS;

  NB: you need to re-activate your working corpus after setting the DataDirctory option

• save named query to disk (in a platform-dependent uncompressed binary format)

  > save Go;

• md* flags show whether a named query is loaded in memory (m), saved on disk (d), or has been modified from the version saved on disk (*)

  > show named;

• discard a named query result to free memory

  > discard Go;

• set DataDirectory to load previously-saved named queries from disk
  (after discarding, or in a new CQP session)

  > set DataDirectory ".";
> show named;
> cat Go;

  note that the actual data is only read into memory when the query results are accessed

• write KWIC output to text file (use TAB key for filename completion)

  > cat Go > "go.txt";

  use set PrintOptions hdr; to add header with information about the corpus and the query (previous CQP versions did this automatically)

• if the filename ends in .gz or .bz2, the file will automatically be compressed (this requires the respective command-line utilities gzip and bzip2 to be available)⁴

• append to an existing file with >>; this also works for compressed files

  > cat Go >> "go.txt";

• you can also write to a pipe⁵ (this example saves only matches that occur in questions, i.e. sentences ending in ?)

  > set Context 1 s;
> cat Go > "| grep '\?$' > go2.txt";

• set PrintMode and PrintOptions for HTML output and other formats (still supported, but not recommended: see Section 2.4)

• frequency counts for matches can also be written to a text file

  > count Go by lemma cut 5 > "go.cnt";

• new in CQP v3.4.14: cat can also be used to print an arbitrary string or redirect it to a file; within an entered string, escape sequences \t (TAB), \r (CR) and \n (LF) are interpreted, all other backslashes are passed through verbatim; note that the string is not automatically terminated with a newline

  > cat "Just another\n\tCQP hacker.\n";

• the new functionality can be combined with output redirection, which is particularly convenient for adding header rows to tabular output files, e.g.

  > cat "f\tmatch [results]\n" > "go.cnt";
> count Go by lemma cut 5 >> "go.cnt";