[chrisweekly]

> "prefer a wrapper that could run within unix pipelines around arbitrary text data files"

That sounds like [lnav](https://www.lnav.org).

For queries, it does use SQLite under the hood, but before querying your "arbitrary text data" files, you can use regex to define a custom format (eg with named groups and back references), providing structure against which standard SQL is an ideal tool to query.

It's simpler than I'm probably making it sound. Highly recommended.