structured-text-tools VS gron

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.

gron (https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron) to transform it and query and then invert the transformation?

It buffers all of its output statements in memory before writing to stdout:

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron/blob/master/main.go#L204

Have you tried `gron`?

It converts your nested json into a line by line format which plays better with tools like `grep`

From the project's README:

▶ gron "https://api.github.com/repos/tomnomnom/gron/commits?per_page..." | fgrep "commit.author"

json[0].commit.author = {};

json[0].commit.author.date = "2016-07-02T10:51:21Z";

json[0].commit.author.email = "[email protected]";

json[0].commit.author.name = "Tom Hudson";

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

It was suggested to me in HN comments on an article I wrote about `jq`, and I have found myself using it a lot in my day to day workflow

> So all I want is a tool to go from json => line oriented and I will do the rest with the vast library of experience I already have at transformations on the command line.*

The tool for that is likely https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

If JQ is too much, see GRON &| Miller

gron transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep for what you want https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for data formats such as CSV, TSV, JSON, JSON https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

And jless [1] and gron [2].

This is the first I'm hearing of gron, but adding here for completeness sake. Meanwhile, JSON seems to be becoming a standard for CLI tools. Ideal scenario would be if every CLI tool has a --json flag or something similar, so that jc is not needed anymore.

[1] https://jless.io/

[2] https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron