hledger/hledger/hledger_options.m4.md

OPTIONS

General options

To see general usage help, including general options which are supported by most hledger commands, run hledger -h.

General help options:

helpoptions

General input options:

inputoptions

General reporting options:

reportingoptions

Command options

To see options for a particular command, including command-specific options, run: hledger COMMAND -h.

Command-specific options must be written after the command name, eg: hledger print -x.

Additionally, if the command is an addon, you may need to put its options after a double-hyphen, eg: hledger ui -- --watch. Or, you can run the addon executable directly: hledger-ui --watch.

Command arguments

Most hledger commands accept arguments after the command name, which are often a query, filtering the data in some way.

Argument files

You can save a set of command line options/arguments in a file, one per line, and then reuse them by writing @FILENAME in a command line. To prevent this expansion of @-arguments, precede them with a -- argument. For more, see Save frequently used options.

Special characters in arguments and queries

In shell command lines, option and argument values which contain “problematic” characters, ie spaces, and also characters significant to your shell such as <, >, (, ), | and $, should be escaped by enclosing them in quotes or by writing backslashes before the characters. Eg:

hledger register -p 'last year' "accounts receivable (receivable|payable)" amt:\>100.

More escaping

Characters significant both to the shell and in regular expressions may need one extra level of escaping. These include parentheses, the pipe symbol and the dollar sign. Eg, to match the dollar symbol, bash users should do:

hledger balance cur:'\$'

or:

hledger balance cur:\\$

Even more escaping

When hledger runs an addon executable (eg you type hledger ui, hledger runs hledger-ui), it de-escapes command-line options and arguments once, so you might need to triple-escape. Eg in bash, running the ui command and matching the dollar sign, it’s:

hledger ui cur:'\\$'

or:

hledger ui cur:\\\\$

If you asked why four slashes above, this may help:

unescaped:	$
escaped:	\$
double-escaped:	\\$
triple-escaped:	\\\\$

(The number of backslashes in fish shell is left as an exercise for the reader.)

You can always avoid the extra escaping for addons by running the addon directly:

hledger-ui cur:\\$

Less escaping

Inside an argument file, or in the search field of hledger-ui or hledger-web, or at a GHCI prompt, you need one less level of escaping than at the command line. And backslashes may work better than quotes. Eg:

ghci> :main balance cur:\$

Command line tips

If in doubt, keep things simple:

• write options after the command (hledger CMD -OPTIONS ARGS)
• run add-on executables directly (hledger-ui -OPTIONS ARGS)
• enclose problematic args in single quotes
• if needed, also add a backslash to escape regexp metacharacters

To find out exactly how a command line is being parsed, add --debug=2 to troubleshoot.

Unicode characters

hledger is expected to handle unicode (non-ascii) characters, but this requires a well-configured environment.

To handle unicode characters in the command line or input data, a system locale that can decode them must be configured (POSIX’s default C locale will not work). Eg in bash, you could do:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

See Troubleshooting for more about this.

Unicode characters should appear correctly in hledger’s output. For the hledger and hledger-ui tools, this requires that

• your terminal supports unicode
• the terminal’s font includes the required unicode glyphs
• the terminal is configured to display “wide” characters as double width (otherwise report alignment will be off)

Input files

hledger reads transactions from a data file (and the add command writes to it). By default this file is $HOME/.hledger.journal (or on Windows, something like C:/Users/USER/.hledger.journal). You can override this with the $LEDGER_FILE environment variable:

$ setenv LEDGER_FILE ~/finance/2016.journal
$ hledger stats

or with the -f/--file option:

$ hledger -f /some/file stats

The file name - (hyphen) means standard input:

$ cat some.journal | hledger -f-

Usually the data file is in hledger’s journal format, but it can also be one of several other formats, listed below. hledger detects the format automatically based on the file extension, or if that is not recognised, by trying each built-in “reader” in turn:

Reader:	Reads:	Used for file extensions:
journal	hledger’s journal format, also some Ledger journals	.journal .j .hledger .ledger
timeclock	timeclock files (precise time logging)	.timeclock
timedot	timedot files (approximate time logging)	.timedot
csv	comma-separated values (data interchange)	.csv

If needed (eg to ensure correct error messages when a file has the “wrong” extension), you can force a specific reader/format by prepending it to the file path with a colon. Examples:

$ hledger -f csv:/some/csv-file.dat stats
$ echo 'i 2009/13/1 08:00:00' | hledger print -ftimeclock:-

You can also specify multiple -f options, to read multiple files as one big journal. There are some limitations with this:

• directives in one file will not affect the other files
• balance assertions will not see any account balances from previous files

If you need those, either use the include directive, or concatenate the files, eg: cat a.journal b.journal | hledger -f- CMD.

Smart dates

hledger’s user interfaces accept a flexible “smart date” syntax (unlike dates in the journal file). Smart dates allow some english words, can be relative to today’s date, and can have less-significant date parts omitted (defaulting to 1).

Examples:

2004/10/1, 2004-01-01, 2004.9.1	exact date, several separators allowed. Year is 4+ digits, month is 1-12, day is 1-31
2004	start of year
2004/10	start of month
10/1	month and day in current year
21	day in current month
october, oct	start of month in current year
yesterday, today, tomorrow	-1, 0, 1 days from today
last/this/next day/week/month/quarter/year	-1, 0, 1 periods from the current period
20181201	8 digit YYYYMMDD with valid year month and day
201812	6 digit YYYYMM with valid year and month

Counterexamples - malformed digit sequences might give surprising results:

201813	6 digits with an invalid month is parsed as start of 6-digit year
20181301	8 digits with an invalid month is parsed as start of 8-digit year
20181232	8 digits with an invalid day gives an error
201801012	9+ digits beginning with a valid YYYYMMDD gives an error

Report start & end date

Most hledger reports show the full span of time represented by the journal data, by default. So, the effective report start and end dates will be the earliest and latest transaction or posting dates found in the journal.

Often you will want to see a shorter time span, such as the current month. You can specify a start and/or end date using -b/--begin, -e/--end, -p/--period or a date: query (described below). All of these accept the smart date syntax. One important thing to be aware of when specifying end dates: as in Ledger, end dates are exclusive, so you need to write the date after the last day you want to include.

Examples:

-b 2016/3/17	begin on St. Patrick’s day 2016
-e 12/1	end at the start of december 1st of the current year (11/30 will be the last date included)
-b thismonth	all transactions on or after the 1st of the current month
-p thismonth	all transactions in the current month
date:2016/3/17-	the above written as queries instead
date:-12/1
date:thismonth-
date:thismonth

Report intervals

A report interval can be specified so that commands like register, balance and activity will divide their reports into multiple subperiods. The basic intervals can be selected with one of -D/--daily, -W/--weekly, -M/--monthly, -Q/--quarterly, or -Y/--yearly. More complex intervals may be specified with a period expression. Report intervals can not be specified with a query, currently.

Period expressions

The -p/--period option accepts period expressions, a shorthand way of expressing a start date, end date, and/or report interval all at once.

Here’s a basic period expression specifying the first quarter of 2009. Note, hledger always treats start dates as inclusive and end dates as exclusive:

-p "from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1"

Keywords like “from” and “to” are optional, and so are the spaces, as long as you don’t run two dates together. “to” can also be written as “-”. These are equivalent to the above:

-p "2009/1/1 2009/4/1"

-p2009/1/1to2009/4/1

-p2009/1/1-2009/4/1

Dates are smart dates, so if the current year is 2009, the above can also be written as:

-p "1/1 4/1"

-p "january-apr"

-p "this year to 4/1"

If you specify only one date, the missing start or end date will be the earliest or latest transaction in your journal:

-p "from 2009/1/1"	everything after january 1, 2009
-p "from 2009/1"	the same
-p "from 2009"	the same
-p "to 2009"	everything before january 1, 2009

A single date with no “from” or “to” defines both the start and end date like so:

-p "2009"	the year 2009; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2010/1/1”
-p "2009/1"	the month of jan; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/2/1”
-p "2009/1/1"	just that day; equivalent to “2009/1/1 to 2009/1/2”

The argument of -p can also begin with, or be, a report interval expression. The basic report intervals are daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly, which have the same effect as the -D,-W,-M,-Q, or -Y flags. Between report interval and start/end dates (if any), the word in is optional. Examples:

-p "weekly from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1"

-p "monthly in 2008"

-p "quarterly"

Note that weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly intervals will always start on the first day on week, month, quarter or year accordingly, and will end on the last day of same period, even if associated period expression specifies different explicit start and end date.

For example:

-p "weekly from 2009/1/1 to 2009/4/1" – starts on 2008/12/29, closest preceeding Monday

-p "monthly in 2008/11/25" – starts on 2018/11/01

-p "quarterly from 2009-05-05 to 2009-06-01" - starts on 2009/04/01, ends on 2009/06/30, which are first and last days of Q2 2009

-p "yearly from 2009-12-29" - starts on 2009/01/01, first day of 2009

The following more complex report intervals are also supported: biweekly, bimonthly, every day|week|month|quarter|year, every N days|weeks|months|quarters|years.

All of these will start on the first day of the requested period and end on the last one, as described above.

Examples:

-p "bimonthly from 2008" – periods will have boundaries on 2008/01/01, 2008/03/01, …

-p "every 2 weeks" – starts on closest preceeding Monday

-p "every 5 month from 2009/03" – periods will have boundaries on 2009/03/01, 2009/08/01, …

If you want intervals that start on arbitrary day of your choosing and span a week, month or year, you need to use any of the following:

every Nth day of week, every <weekday>, every Nth day [of month], every Nth weekday [of month], every MM/DD [of year], every Nth MMM [of year], every MMM Nth [of year].

Examples:

-p "every 2nd day of week" – periods will go from Tue to Tue

-p "every Tue" – same

-p "every 15th day" – period boundaries will be on 15th of each month

-p "every 2nd Monday" – period boundaries will be on second Monday of each month

-p "every 11/05" – yearly periods with boundaries on 5th of Nov

-p "every 5th Nov" – same

-p "every Nov 5th" – same

Show historical balances at end of 15th each month (N is exclusive end date):

hledger balance -H -p "every 16th day"

Group postings from start of wednesday to end of next tuesday (N is start date and exclusive end date):

hledger register checking -p "every 3rd day of week"

Depth limiting

With the --depth N option (short form: -N), commands like account, balance and register will show only the uppermost accounts in the account tree, down to level N. Use this when you want a summary with less detail. This flag has the same effect as a depth: query argument (so -2, --depth=2 or depth:2 are basically equivalent).

Pivoting

Normally hledger sums amounts, and organizes them in a hierarchy, based on account name. The --pivot FIELD option causes it to sum and organize hierarchy based on the value of some other field instead. FIELD can be: code, description, payee, note, or the full name (case insensitive) of any tag. As with account names, values containing colon:separated:parts will be displayed hierarchically in reports.

--pivot is a general option affecting all reports; you can think of hledger transforming the journal before any other processing, replacing every posting’s account name with the value of the specified field on that posting, inheriting it from the transaction or using a blank value if it’s not present.

An example:

2016/02/16 Member Fee Payment
    assets:bank account                    2 EUR
    income:member fees                    -2 EUR  ; member: John Doe

Normal balance report showing account names:

$ hledger balance
               2 EUR  assets:bank account
              -2 EUR  income:member fees
--------------------
                   0

Pivoted balance report, using member: tag values instead:

$ hledger balance --pivot member
               2 EUR
              -2 EUR  John Doe
--------------------
                   0

One way to show only amounts with a member: value (using a query, described below):

$ hledger balance --pivot member tag:member=.
              -2 EUR  John Doe
--------------------
              -2 EUR

Another way (the acct: query matches against the pivoted “account name”):

$ hledger balance --pivot member acct:.
              -2 EUR  John Doe
--------------------
              -2 EUR

Cost

The -B/--cost flag converts amounts to their cost at transaction time, if they have a transaction price specified.

Market value

The -V/--value flag converts reported amounts to their current market value.
Specifically, when there is a market price (P directive) for the amount’s commodity, dated on or before today’s date (or the report end date if specified), the amount will be converted to the price’s commodity.

When there are multiple applicable P directives, -V chooses the most recent one, or in case of equal dates, the last-parsed one.

For example:

# one euro is worth this many dollars from nov 1
P 2016/11/01 € $1.10

# purchase some euros on nov 3
2016/11/3
    assets:euros        €100
    assets:checking

# the euro is worth fewer dollars by dec 21
P 2016/12/21 € $1.03

How many euros do I have ?

$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros
                €100  assets:euros

What are they worth at end of nov 3 ?

$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros -V -e 2016/11/4
             $110.00  assets:euros

What are they worth after 2016/12/21 ? (no report end date specified, defaults to today)

$ hledger -f t.j bal -N euros -V
             $103.00  assets:euros

Currently, hledger’s -V only uses market prices recorded with P directives, not transaction prices (unlike Ledger).

Currently, -V has a limitation in multicolumn balance reports: it uses the market prices on the report end date for all columns. (Instead of the prices on each column’s end date.)

Combining -B and -V

Using -B/–cost and -V/–value together is currently allowed, but the results are probably not meaningful. Let us know if you find a use for this.

Output destination

Some commands (print, register, stats, the balance commands) can write their output to a destination other than the console. This is controlled by the -o/--output-file option.

$ hledger balance -o -     # write to stdout (the default)
$ hledger balance -o FILE  # write to FILE

Output format

Some commands can write their output in other formats. Eg print and register can output CSV, and the balance commands can output CSV or HTML. This is controlled by the -O/--output-format option, or by specifying a .csv or .html file extension with -o/--output-file.

$ hledger balance -O csv       # write CSV to stdout
$ hledger balance -o FILE.csv  # write CSV to FILE.csv

Regular expressions

hledger uses regular expressions in a number of places:

• query terms, on the command line and in the hledger-web search form: REGEX, desc:REGEX, cur:REGEX, tag:...=REGEX
• CSV rules conditional blocks: if REGEX ...
• account alias directives and options: alias /REGEX/ = REPLACEMENT, --alias /REGEX/=REPLACEMENT

hledger’s regular expressions come from the regex-tdfa library. In general they:

• are case insensitive
• are infix matching (do not need to match the entire thing being matched)
• are POSIX extended regular expressions
• also support GNU word boundaries (\<, \>, \b, \B)
• and parenthesised capturing groups and numeric backreferences in replacement strings
• do not support mode modifiers like (?s)

Some things to note:

• In the alias directive and --alias option, regular expressions must be enclosed in forward slashes (/REGEX/). Elsewhere in hledger, these are not required.

• In queries, to match a regular expression metacharacter like $ as a literal character, prepend a backslash. Eg to search for amounts with the dollar sign in hledger-web, write cur:\$.

• On the command line, some metacharacters like $ have a special meaning to the shell and so must be escaped at least once more. See Special characters.