Seems if the query is always going to start with SELECT, that maybe it should be assumed?
I would never use this though, ack or find seem sufficient to me.
It's a shame Bash used 'select' as an elaborate menu built-in - it'd be quite neat to name the binary that (and drop the quotes). The you could just type the query right into your prompt!
Just use the fish shell instead, and you can avoid the years of shell cruft of bash, or the endless customization of zsh. Bash is a good environment for shell scripting, but not really the best for user interaction. Although perl is probably the best environment for shell scripting.
Or just ... Why even bother naming fields. Just make <space> enter return everything from anywhere from all time for all people on all platforms.
How many times are we going to have this ridiculous suggestion that less characters/words is automatically better.
This is 'short/arrow functions' (pick your language) all over again, and invariably ends up with the situation where the new syntax is just fucking impossible to read at first glance, because it has so many variances.
Parens are optional. Unless you have no arguments, then they're required. Curly braces are optional, unless you want more than a simple expression, or no return or to return an object literal, then they're required.
I grow weary enough of this bullshit notion that code must 'look pretty', but when you're using "less characters is always best" as the definition for 'pretty' it just becomes unbearable.
It could be extended with other queries like “update” for batch file operations, I suppose. Like you, I’m fine with my existing suite of find/grep/ack/awk/perl/whatever, but I already know how to use them; a beginner or someone who doesn’t live their whole life at a Unix terminal could probably benefit from the simpler interface.