Execute SQLite script

You want to feed the create.sql into sqlite3 from the shell, not from inside SQLite itself:

$ sqlite3 auction.db < create.sql

SQLite's version of SQL doesn't understand < for files, your shell does.

There are many ways to do this, one way is:

sqlite3 auction.db

Followed by:

sqlite> .read create.sql

In general, the SQLite project has really fantastic documentation! I know we often reach for Google before the docs, but in SQLite's case, the docs really are technical writing at its best. It's clean, clear, and concise.

In order to execute simple queries and return to my shell script, I think this works well:

$ sqlite3 example.db 'SELECT * FROM some_table;'