JQ a lightweight command line processing tool for JSON

I came across a CLI tool which felt worth a look.

JQ is a lightweight and flexible command-line processing tool which can be used for transforming JSON data to desired text format, can be used for filtering, restricting & extracting specific properties from the JSON.

Photo by Drew Dempsey on Unsplash

How to install?

Using Brew

brew install jq

Using APT

apt install jq

Before we begin let say we have JSON file (employees.json) with contents in it

[
  {
    "id": 101,
    "firstName": "Joan",
    "lastName": "Paul",
    "ctc": 60000
  },
  {
    "id": 102,
    "firstName": "Raj",
    "lastName": "Singh",
    "ctc": 65000
  },
  {
    "id": 103,
    "firstName": "Christy",
    "lastName": "Franco",
    "ctc": 75000
  },
  {
    "id": 104,
    "firstName": "Dean",
    "lastName": "Backer",
    "ctc": 55000
  },
  {
    "id": 105,
    "firstName": "Raj",
    "lastName": "Dev",
    "ctc": 72000
  }
]

Here, is how you can use the JQ command can be used

jq '.' employees.json

or

cat employees.json | jq '.'