Why does csvtk freq only accept one file ?

[tseemann]

I was surprised to discover that csvtk freq does not support -X / --infile-list fofn.txt
I get this error:

[ERRO] no more than one file should be given

To resolve I am using xargs -a fofn.txt zcat | csvtk freq but wanted to understand why this is a restriction?

[shenwei356]

38 subcommands do not support multiple files, cause files might have different delimiters or numbers of columns.

[tseemann]

Is there a way you can remove the -X line from the --help output for those 38 toosl?

[shenwei356]

There is, but it would not be very pleasant to add it to each of the left 57-38=19 commands.

I've added a note to -X and the general attention message.

  -X, --infile-list string     file of input files list (one file per line), if given, they are appended
                               to files from cli arguments. Note that less than half of the subcommands
                               support >1 file.