Here we will discuss simple and useful commands used by SQLite programmers. These commands are called SQLite dot commands and exception with these commands is that they should not be terminated by a simi-colon(;).

We will see a simple sqlite3 command at command prompt which will provide you SQLite command prompt where you will issue various SQLite commands.

$sqlite3
SQLite version 3.3.6
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite>

For a listing of the available dot commands, you can enter ".help" at any time. For example:

sqlite>.help

Above command will display a list of various important SQLite dot commands,

which are as follows:

Let's try .show command to see default setting for your SQLite command prompt.

sqlite>.show
         echo: off
     explain: off
    headers: off
        mode: column
  nullvalue: ""
      output: stdout
 separator: "|"
        width:
sqlite>

Make sure there is no space in between sqlite> prompt and dot command, otherwise it will not work.

Formatting output

You can use the following sequence of dot commands to format your output the way I have listed down in this tutorial: 

sqlite>.header on
sqlite>.mode column
sqlite>.timer on
sqlite>

Above setting will produce the output in the following format:

ID          NAME        AGE         ADDRESS     SALARY
----------  ----------  ----------  ----------  ----------
1           Paul        32          California  20000.0
2           Allen       25          Texas       15000.0
3           Teddy       23          Norway      20000.0
4           Mark        25          Rich-Mond   65000.0
5           David       27          Texas       85000.0
6           Kim         22          South-Hall  45000.0
7           James       24          Houston     10000.0
CPU Time: user 0.000000 sys 0.000000

The sqlite_master Table

The master table holds the key information about your database tables and it is called sqlite_master. You can see its schema as follows: 

sqlite>.schema sqlite_master

This will produce the following result:

CREATE TABLE sqlite_master (
  type text,
  name text,
  tbl_name text,
  rootpage integer,
  sql text
);