jq: grep and prettify json

If you don't use jq, you are missing a very important utility in your bash toolset. jq let's you query and filter json files from a cli. Just like awk or sed, js's "language" is basically write only, meaning whenever you need to do something there's a 99% chance you'll just be copy-pasting recipes from Stackoverflow until you find the one that works for you. Here are a couple of recipes I found most useful:

cat a json file - with pretty print

jq . /path/to/json_file

Select a single key

jq '.path.to.key'

The command above will return "42" for a json that looks like "{path: {to: {key: 42}}}"

Delete all entries in an object, except for one

jq '.foo|=bar'

The command above will return "{foo: {bar:''}}" for a json that looks like "{foo: {bar:'', baz: ''}}"

This is probably not even enough to get started. Luckily there's plenty of docs to read @ https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/