Command line usage of Hive

Example of running Query from command line
hive -e 'select a.col from tab1 a'

Example of setting hive configuration variables
hive -e 'select a.col from tab1 a' -hiveconf hive.exec.scratchdir=/home/my/hive_scratch -hiveconf mapred.reduce.tasks=32

Example of dumping data out from a query into a file using silent mode
hive -S -e 'select a.col from tab1 a' > a.txt