json - mongoexport without _id field

Question

I am using mongoexport to export some data into .json formatted file, however the document has a large size overhead introduced by _id:IDVALUE tuples.

I found a similar post Is there a way to retrieve data from MongoDB without the _id field? on how to omit the _id field when retrieving data from mongo, but not exporting. It is suggested to use: .Exclude("_id"). I tried to reqrite the --query parameter of mongoexport to somehow include the .Exclude("_id") parameter, but all of the attempts failed so far.

Please suggest what is the proper way of doing this, or should I revert to using some post-export techniques?

Thanks

Answer 1

There appears to be no way to exclude a field (such as _id) using mongoexport.

Here's an alternative that has worked for me on moderate sized databases:

mongo myserver/mydb --quiet --eval "db.mycoll.find({}, {_id:0}).forEach(printjson);" > out.txt

On a large database (many millions of records) it can take a while and running this will affect other operations people try to do on the system: