[GRASS-user] temporarily edit tables (dbf) outside of GRASS

[Tim Michelsen]

Hello,
I need to do some calculations on my attribute tables.

What is the corresponding command in GRASS for this?

Is it safe to edit the DBF-table outside of GRASS in another program?
For instance in OpenOfficeCalc?
Or even as a CSV with Python, IDL, etc.?

I will use a scripting language to calculate new fields based the existing
values in the table.

After the calculations I would like to use this new values in GRASS.

Although, I know that GRASS is fully scriptable I am a beginner in GRASS.
Therefore, I do not want to transfer my existing code to a GRASS script
(also due to time restrictions).
Hopefully, I will be able to do that on a later stage. 

Thanks and kind regards,
Tim M.