Alexander Bird Software • Blog

jq cheat sheet

Notes on cool things to do with the JSON processor tool

(Link to official jq docs)

Making .jq files executable

  $ echo '"World"' | ./greeting.jq
  {
    "hello": "World"
  }
  $ cat greeting.jq
  #!/usr/bin/env jq -f
  
  {
    hello: .
  }

• make sure the file is executable (chmod +x greeting.jq)
• The -f flag tells jq to read the filter from file

Table Formatting

Unix column formats tab separated output as a table and jq @tsv produces tab separated output.

  curl https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users \
    | jq -r ".[] | [.id, .address.city, .name] | @tsv" \
    | column -ts $'\t'

Vim syntax highlighting

GitHub: vito-c/jq.vim

Written 2020-12