yq VS structured-text-tools

Install jq and yq, and wrap your commands with | yq -y ..

Confusingly there is another project called yq that does exactly what you're suggesting and it's a preprocessor that converts yaml to json and then used jq. https://github.com/kislyuk/yq

yq

I personally find the yq tool from https://github.com/kislyuk/yq much more useful: it has all the same options and formats as `jq` (as it's really a wrapper around jq). Rather than the `yq` in the OP here where only partial functionality exists.

XML data from the API can be parsed and filtered with xq. There may be multiple ways to get it; first try the yq toolset which includes it.

There is also yq [1], which attempts the same for yaml, toml and xml. (And confusingly also contains a binary named "xq" for querying xml, however with a different syntax)

[1] https://github.com/kislyuk/yq

This works well in scripts and logs of all the commands you need to do to reproduce the current state of the system from a scratch install. Also can be used with diff -u and patch, sed, perl, and awk oneliners and structured text tools. You can also capture most of the commands using sudo logging feature but it won't capture the here documents. But for modest size files you can use newlines in echo commands. Note that commands which use redrection should use something like ~~~~ sudo bash -c "echo 'foo' >>file.txt" ~~~~ instead of "sudo echo foo >>file.txt" or "echo foo | sudo tee -a file.txt

TFA is about how to handle csv files with awk. This might be useful in straightforward cases.

For all others I’d recommend to have a look at

https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools

which lists tools to handle structure text formats

in general, I'd pick something from https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools

Also, here is a list of structured text tools. You may find some tools there that are helpful in editing configuration files from the command line. Or you can use "diff -u" to create a patch file (you need to save the patch files along with sudo.log) to recreate. Also, use sfdisk --dump and sfdisk --backup to save partition information in a form that can be used to recreate backups.