Using a SQL source file with the bigquery cli

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

bq query < my_query.sql

Answer

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 ;