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jq CLI Cheat Sheet

Installation

sudo apt update
sudo apt install jq

On Windows, you can download the executable from the jq website. You will need to add the executable to your PATH environment variable.

General Commands

Output a JSON file, in pretty-print format 

jq . file.json

Pretty-print API output 

curl example.org/api/v1/users | jq .

Output all elements from arrays (or all key-value pairs from objects) in a JSON file 

jq .[] file.json

Read JSON objects from a file into an array, and output it (inverse of jq .[]) 

jq --slurp . file.json

Output the first element in a JSON file 

jq .[0] file.json

Mapping & Transforming

Additional References

  1. https://jqlang.github.io/jq/ ↩

  2. https://github.com/jqlang/jq ↩