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Ledger has a very simple command-line interface, named—enticing
enough—ledger
. It supports a few reporting commands, and
a large number of options for refining the output from those commands.
The basic syntax of any ledger command is:
ledger [OPTIONS...] COMMAND [ARGS...]
Command options must always precede the command word. After the
command word there may appear any number of arguments. For most
commands, these arguments are regular expressions that cause the
output to relate only to transactions matching those regular
expressions. For the entry
command, the arguments have a
special meaning, described below.
The regular expressions arguments always match the account name that a transaction refers to. To match on the payee of the entry instead, precede the regular expression with ‘--’. For example, the following balance command reports account totals for rent, food and movies, but only those whose payee matches Freddie:
ledger bal rent food movies -- freddie
There are many, many command options available with the
ledger
command, and it takes a while to master them.
However, none of them are required to use the basic reporting
commands.
• Usage overview: | ||
• Commands: | ||
• Options: | ||
• Format strings: | ||
• Value expressions: | ||
• Period expressions: | ||
• File format: | ||
• Some typical queries: | ||
• Budgeting and forecasting: |
Next: Keeping a ledger, Previous: Introduction, Up: Top [Contents]