There are a number of command line tools available to help you work with JSON data.

1. jq (GitHub)
   • jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor.
   • jq is like sed for JSON data - you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text.
   • jq is written in portable C, and it has zero runtime dependencies. You can download a single binary, scp it to a far away machine of the same type, and expect it to work.
   • jq can mangle the data format that you have into the one that you want with very little effort, and the program to do so is often shorter and simpler than you’d expect.
   • You can download jq from here (tutorial, manual).
   For example you can use:

   @system("curl 'https://api.github.com/repos/stedolan/jq/commits?per_page=5' | jq '.[0]'")
   

2. GROQ (GitHub)
   • Graph-Relational Object Queries (GROQ) is a query language (like SQL, but different) which is designed to work directly on JSON documents.
   • Its primary design goals are expressive filtering, joining of several documents into a single response, and shaping the response to fit the client application.
   • The idea behind GROQ is to be able to describe exactly what information your application needs, potentially joining together information from several sets of documents, then stitching together a very specific response with only the exact fields you need.
   • It basically lets you write queries you can quickly filter and then reformat JSON documents to get them into the most convenient shape.
   • GROQ was developed by Sanity.io (where it’s used as the primary query language). It’s open source and it gives us built-in ways to use it in JavaScript and the command line on any JSON source.
   • You can install using npm with npm install -g groq-cli
   For example you can use:

   @system{console}("curl -o todos.json https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos")
   @system("cat todos.json | groq '*[completed == true]{title, userId}' --pretty")
   @system{console}("rm todos.json")
   

   or alternatively,

   @system("curl -sS https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos | groq '*[completed == true]{title, userId}' --pretty")
   

Other tools you might find useful include: