Formatting JSON in the Terminal: The Essential jq Command Guide
Master the command-line jq utility for beautifying, filtering, querying, and transforming JSON streams on Linux and macOS.
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`jq` is the standard lightweight command-line JSON processor for bash, zsh, and terminal environments.
Basic Beautification
Pipe any minified curl output into `jq` for instant colorized formatting: ```bash curl -s https://api.example.com/data | jq . ```
Selecting Specific Keys
Extract only the user email from a response: ```bash curl -s https://api.example.com/user | jq '.data.email' ```
Filtering Arrays
Filter all active users: ```bash cat users.json | jq '.[] | select(.active == true)' ```
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