bcftools - reducing to "sites-only"?

Question

[Matthew]

I have some very large WGS BCF files and I would to extract just the first 8 columns, thus reducing to just a 'sites-only' VCF/BCF.

Does BCFTOOLS have a canned option for doing it?

I know I can do this:

query -f "%CHROM\t%POS\t%ID\t%REF\t%ALT\t%QUAL\t%FILTER\t%INFO\n"

but I'm finding that that is quite slow (>24hrs for some files in my case) - understandably so, since it will need to parse each BCF record (and I'll bet it's parsing all the per-sample information, which I don't want) and then reconstruct the desired output line for each row, according to that complex format string. But since my format string is really just "the first 8 columns please, unchanged", and "sites-only" VCF/BCFs are sort of a common/known thing, I wonder if there isn't a more efficient way to do that?

Thanks for any info

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

bcftools view -G in.vcf.gz

[Matthew]

Thank you Pierre!
Not sure why I didn't notice that (I should have)

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

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