I am considering making a JSON parsing and generating command line tool. Started with looking around a bit. Below is a list of existing JSON command line tools. Numbers are [GitHub stars] at the time of writing this post. (… contributed by …) means that this post was updated with the item.

• jq [11126] – filter, extract, modify and output JSON or text using DSL
• jid [4426] – “You can drill down JSON interactively by using filtering queries like jq.” (item contributed by /u/Tacticus)
• gron [4103] – convert JSON or JSON lines (from file/stdin/url) to text (path=value) which can be processed with grep/sed/diff; the tool also supports converting back to JSON after such processing
• jo [2209] – generate JSON based on command line arguments and stdin; can read data from files and place it as base64 encoded values
• JSON.sh [1635] – written in shell/gawk; “traverses the JSON objects and prints out the path to the current object (as a JSON array) and then the object, without whitespace”
• jsawk [1239] – focused primarily on filtering and transforming a list (or an object)
• json (by trentm) [1218] – “massaging JSON on your Unix command line”; JS-like syntax for extracting values; in-place file editing
• rq [1007] – awk/sed-like tool for structured data; supports several formats, including JSON
• TickTick [469] – use JSON syntax directly in bash; “This is just a fun hack”
• jshon [309] – very CLI-ish way to extract, manipulate and output the data
• jl [308] – “a tiny functional language for querying and manipulating JSON”; visually reminds Haskell
• jsonpp [244] – JSON pretty printer (item contributed by /u/ferbass)
• fx [227] – conveniently run your JS code to manipulate JSON.
• RecordStream [224] – create, manipulate and output records; supports JSON; Perl-based so grep expressions for example are in Perl.
• JSON.awk [186] – JSON.sh fork in awk; after fork the projects added different features.
• jp [184] – “command line interface to JMESPath” (link contributed by Evgeny Zislis)
• json-command [143] – conveniently manipulate JSON using JS.
• jsonv.sh [130] – convert JSON to CSV; specify paths in JSON to
• jgrep (aka “JSON-grep”) [78] – “Command line tool and API for parsing JSON documents” in Ruby (item contributed by /u/tophlammiepie)
• jsed [48] – manipulate and extract data; somewhat similar to jsawk in mindset
• jsongrep [9] (by dsc) – extract data at given path using shell globs and output one per line
• jsongrep [0] (by terrycojones) – easily extract data at given path

Honorable mentions

• python -m json.tool – the JSON Python module (mention contributed by Evgeny Zislis)

Update 2018-09-10:

I’ve added related post in which I argue that jq functionality belongs to a shell.

If you feel that some project is missing from the list, please let me know in comments below.