I have been trying these utilities in the last few days. They work nice, but the documentation is very obscure! There is not even an --help flag implemented, and you have to go back to the web page every time.

Anyway, here are a few examples, not covered in the in the documentation:

Given a Gene ID, download the aminoacid sequences of the corresponding Proteins, keeping only the reviewed entries (e.g. no putative, predicted sequences):

esearch -db gene -query "1234[id]" | elink -target protein | efilter -query "REVIEWED[FILTER]"| efetch -format fasta

Given a file containing a list of Gene IDs (one per line), download all the entries in tabular format:

esearch -db gene -query $(paste -s -d ','  mygenes.ids) | efetch -format tabular > mygenes.details.txt

Please add more examples!

First thought: does this mean that my home grown, undocumented, hacky curl based shell script is obsolete?

Second thought: What took them so long?