A Practical Guide to jq in Shell Scripts
dev.to·
Manipulating structured JSON payloads inside shell scripts and command-line pipelines is an essential skill for backend automation, DevOps tasks, and API debugging. This hands-on guide covers foundational to advanced `jq` techniques for shell integration. It demonstrates filtering array streams with `select`, mapping and transforming structures, generating JSON objects from scratch using `-n`, and passing dynamic shell variables safely into queries with `--arg` and `--argjson`. Additionally, it illustrates how to store reusable processing logic in filter files using `-f` and handle JSON lines (`.jsonl`) files efficiently.