gron - greppable JSON from the command-line

JSON is everywhere. Sometimes it ends up as a file on my disk and I need to parse it to use some data.

jq is the best-known way for manipulating JSON from the command line. It's flexible and powerful, but I can never remember the syntax for anything beyond extracting a single field.

I recently discovered gron which makes JSON easily greppable by printing each field of a JSON object on its own line.

gron "https://api.github.com/repos/tomnomnom/gron/commits?per_page=1" | fgrep "commit.author"

json[0].commit.author = {};
json[0].commit.author.date = "2020-11-07T01:17:42Z";
json[0].commit.author.email = "[email protected]";
json[0].commit.author.name = "Tom Hudson";

A useful tool to have in the toolbox!