Embedding DuckDB

CLI Client

The Command Line Interface (CLI) client is intended for interactive use cases and not for embedding. As a result, it has more features that could be abused by a malicious actor. For example, the CLI client has the .sh feature that allows executing arbitrary shell commands. This feature is only present in the CLI client and not in any other DuckDB clients.

.sh ls

Tip Calling DuckDB’s CLI client via shell commands is not recommended for embedding DuckDB. It is recommended to use one of the client libraries, e.g., Python, R, Java, etc.