6.1. Command Line Interface

The Presto CLI provides a terminal-based interactive shell for running queries. The CLI is a self-executing JAR file, which means it acts like a normal UNIX executable.

Download presto-cli.jar, rename it to presto, make it executable with chmod +x, then run it:

./presto --server localhost:8080 --catalog hive --schema default

Run the CLI with the --help option to see the available options.

By default, the results of queries are paginated using the less program which is configured with a carefully selected set of options. This behavior can be overridden by setting the environment variable PRESTO_PAGER to the name of a different program such as more, or set it to an empty value to completely disable pagination.