jq

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

35854 stars · 4839 forks observed · 2026-10-19

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-09-28, confidence 0.99

jq is a lightweight, portable command-line tool for processing JSON data. It lets you slice, filter, map, and transform JSON with concise, sed/awk-like expressions.

Use cases

• extract specific fields from a large JSON file
• filter JSON objects based on criteria in a shell pipeline
• transform JSON data into a different structure for downstream processing
• perform ad‑hoc queries on API responses directly in the terminal
• convert JSON to CSV or other formats using custom scripts

When to choose

• You need a fast, zero‑dependency tool for JSON manipulation in scripts.
• You work primarily in a Unix‑like shell environment and prefer command‑line utilities.
• You require complex filtering or mapping of JSON without writing a full program.

When to avoid

• You need a graphical interface for JSON editing.
• Your workflow depends on a language‑specific JSON library with deep integration.
• You require real‑time streaming processing of massive JSON streams beyond what jq can handle.

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

parser cli data-science windows cross-platform cli json command-line lightweight sed-like filtering transformation data-engineering linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="jqlang/jq")