jq: passing json to jq

Read this excellent wikipedia page for more information about here-documents and other variations thereof.

The content on this page was written primarily from a bash user point of view.

using echo

One way that I see people using jq is by using echo piped into jq.

echo '{"x": {"y": [1,2,3], "z": [4,5]}}' | jq '.'

using here-strings

Doing the same with with here-strings looks as follows.

<<< '{"x": {"y": [1,2,3], "z": [4,5]}}' jq '.'

using cat

cat myfile | jq '.'

using a file