This assumes that rq is installed. See
installation for more details on how to do that if
you want to follow along.
rq reads record data from stdin, and writes transformed data to
stdout. By default, it uses JSON for the input and output format, and
returns each input record unmodified:
$ rq <<< 'null true {"a": 2.5}'
null
true
{"a":2.5}
This Markdown document doesn't do the rq output justice. The output
of rq is actually very colorful!
You can configure the input and output formats to use with flags (see
rq --help for details). A lower-case single-letter flag sets the
input format, and an upper-case single-letter flag sets the output
format. For example, to read JSON and output CBOR, pass -jC and to
read CBOR and output JSON, pass -cJ. This can be used to build a
not-very-useful conversion pipeline that round-trips to CBOR (maybe
you could pipe it through gzip and ssh in-between and it might be
worth it):
$ (rq -jC | rq -cJ) <<< 'null true {"a": 2.5}'
null
true
{"a":2.5}
Some format flags take an argument to configure them, for example Google Protocol Buffers:
$ rq protobuf add example.proto
$ rq -p .example.Person < person.pb
{"name":"John","age":34}