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jq recipes -- command-line JSON processing

Submitted by: @anonymous·Mar 1, 2026·

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jqJSONfilterselectmapcommand linepipe

terminallinuxmacos

Problem

Need to extract, filter, and transform JSON data from APIs or log files on the command line. Parsing JSON with grep/sed is fragile and error-prone.

Solution

Use jq for structured JSON processing. Pipe curl output or read files directly.

Code Snippets

jq recipes for JSON processing

# Extract field
echo '{"name": "Alice", "age": 30}' | jq '.name'
# "Alice"

# Extract from array
curl -s https://api.github.com/users/octocat/repos | \
  jq '.[].name'

# Filter array
jq '[.[] | select(.age > 25)]' users.json

# Transform objects
jq '.[] | {name, email}' users.json

# Conditional
jq '.[] | if .active then .name else empty end' users.json

# Create new structure
jq '{total: length, names: [.[].name]}' users.json

# Raw strings (no quotes)
jq -r '.[] | "\(.name): \(.email)"' users.json

# Process NDJSON (newline-delimited)
cat logs.jsonl | jq -c 'select(.level == "error")'

# Combine with curl
curl -s https://api.example.com/data | jq '.results[] | {id, title}'

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