Using a SQL source file with the bigquery cli

Question

Is it possible to use an input file with the bigquery CLI?

bq query < my_query.sql

Answer 1

If you're using unix (or have cygwin installed on windows), you can use xargs:

xargs -a my_query.sql -0 bq query

Alternately you can use back-ticks:

bq query `cat my_query.sql`

Note that bq can only process one command at a time -- if your .sql script has several queries, you'll need to split the file on ;

Answer 2

I wasn't able to get the other solutions to work with very long and complex queries, particularly those with any kind of quote marks in them. I've had more luck piping the file into the bq tool

cat test.sql | bq query