Skip to content
man
jq

jq

add or modify json key/value

let’s say you want to add "apitoken": "top-secret" within clodflare.

example cf.json test file:

{
  "cloudflare": {
    "TYPE": "CLOUDFLAREAPI",
    "accountid": "foobar"
  }
}

do this:

jq '.cloudflare.apitoken = "top-secret"' cf.json | sponge cf.json

with sponge the file will be written to disk and updated.

delete key/value from json file

assume you want to delete the apitoken field from cf.json, do this:

jq 'del(.cloudflare.apitoken)' cf.json | sponge cf.json

get multiple items

just comma separate what you want

bw list items --search zoho|jq '.[].login.username, .[].login.password'

get raw output

… instead of JSON strings for example

-r               output raw strings, not JSON texts;
jq -r '.[].login.username, .[].login.password'

get the first element 

jq .[0] file.json

merge multiple json files

for example: fitbit export, separated by day but same format otherwise. I wanted one file out of 4 years of data:

jq -s . heart_rate*.json > ../heart_rate.json

or just use flatten like this:

jq -c --slurp 'flatten' steps-*.json > ../steps.json

pretty print json 

your-json | jq
jq < file.json

reformat json file (formatting, prettier) 

jq < ~/downloads/data.json | sponge ~/downloads/data.json

you might not need jq 

curl -sS https://abc.json | python -m json.tool
journalctlk3s