Question

What SQL can be used to list the tables, and the rows within those tables in an SQLite database file – once I have attached it with the ATTACH command on the sqlite3 command line tool?

Answer 1

The .tables, and .schema ‘helper’ functions don’t look into ATTACHed databases: they just query the SQLITE_MASTER table for the ‘main’ database. Consequently, if you used

ATTACH some_file.db AS my_db; 

then you need to do

SELECT name FROM my_db.sqlite_master WHERE type='table'; 

Note that temporary tables don’t show up with .tables either: you have to list sqlite_temp_master for that:

SELECT name FROM sqlite_temp_master WHERE type='table';