command line arguments - how to pass json file name to jq?

Question

currently I call

cat my_file.json | jq

to pretty print json data. I am a bit surprised that I can't do

jq my_file.json

or

jq --file my_file.json

Is it true that I can not specify a file name? If so, why the restriction?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65646331/how-to-pass-json-file-name-to-jq

Answer 1

You need to specify the jq program to run:

jq . my_file.json

jq -h

The usage line produced by jq -h:

Usage:  jq [options] <jq filter> [file...]

Note that the summary produced by invoking jq with the -h option does not (currently) provide a complete listing of the options. For the supported options, see the jq manual: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/

Two undocumented options of note are:

--debug-dump-disasm
--debug-trace

jq .

Under certain circumstances, jq . can be abbreviated to jq but it's always safe to use the full form; a good rule of thumb is: if in doubt, do so.