jq is a powerful JSON processor
So lately I’ve been using jq quite a bit. It is a CLI JSON processor that
makes your life easier if you have to deal with a lot of JSON. Here I’m going
to give two examples of how it’s used.
Search response
I’ve been dealing with JSON from Elasticsearch API1, but as they would not release their documents under a free license, I will take an example from OpenSearch instead2:
{
"took": 39,
"timed_out": false,
"_shards": {
"total": 68,
"successful": 68,
"skipped": 0,
"failed": 0
},
"hits": {
"total": {
"value": 5837,
"relation": "eq"
},
"max_score": 7.8623476,
"hits": [
{
"_index": "new_shakespeare",
"_type": "_doc",
"_id": "100763",
"_score": 7.8623476,
"_source": {
"type": "line",
"line_id": 100764,
"play_name": "Troilus and Cressida",
"speech_number": 43,
"line_number": "3.1.68",
"speaker": "PANDARUS",
"text_entry": "Sweet queen, sweet queen! thats a sweet queen, i faith."
}
},
{
"_index": "shakespeare",
"_type": "_doc",
"_id": "28559",
"_score": 5.8923807,
"_source": {
"type": "line",
"line_id": 28560,
"play_name": "Cymbeline",
"speech_number": 20,
"line_number": "1.1.81",
"speaker": "QUEEN",
"text_entry": "No, be assured you shall not find me, daughter,"
}
}
]
}
}
Woah that’s long!
How do you know how much time it took? I want to measure the performance.
$ curl ... | jq '.took'
39
Nice. Not very helpful, though—I can easily see that at the top of the result. I want to see which responses were returned.
$ curl ... | jq '.hits.hits'
[
{
"_index": "new_shakespeare",
"_type": "_doc",
"_id": "100763",
"_score": 7.8623476,
"_source": {
"type": "line",
"line_id": 100764,
"play_name": "Troilus and Cressida",
"speech_number": 43,
"line_number": "3.1.68",
"speaker": "PANDARUS",
"text_entry": "Sweet queen, sweet queen! thats a sweet queen, i faith."
}
},
{
"_index": "shakespeare",
"_type": "_doc",
"_id": "28559",
"_score": 5.8923807,
"_source": {
"type": "line",
"line_id": 28560,
"play_name": "Cymbeline",
"speech_number": 20,
"line_number": "1.1.81",
"speaker": "QUEEN",
"text_entry": "No, be assured you shall not find me, daughter,"
}
}
]
The response is the value of hits inside a hits, so the query is
.hits.hits. How intuitive!
But this is hard to read. Let’s just take the play_name of the result.
$ curl ... | jq .hits.hits[]._source.play_name
"Troilus and Cressida"
"Cymbeline"
Neat! But how does it work? The brackets [] signifies that we should take
all the results, from each of which the value for ._source.play_name is
taken.
There might be the option to write that in the search query DSL, which also reduces the data transferred, but I bet this is much easier to write.
Wallpaper
I use feh for setting wallpaper, which can take an image from the internet.
Previously, I used a static list that I collected myself, but I recently
discovered a wallpaper API from wallhaven.
Let’s say, I want to get a space image as wallpaper, I would use this command:
curl -s 'https://wallhaven.cc/api/v1/search?q=space&ratios=16x9&sorting=toplist'
Where q is the query, ratios is the image ratio so that it fits the screen,
and sorting is the way the results would be sorted before pagination. The
results is long, but it looks like this:
{
"data": [
{
"id": "l3zmwy",
"url": "https://wallhaven.cc/w/l3zmwy",
"short_url": "https://whvn.cc/l3zmwy",
"views": 67050,
"favorites": 705,
"source": "https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YaQwgP",
"purity": "sfw",
"category": "general",
"dimension_x": 1920,
"dimension_y": 1080,
"resolution": "1920x1080",
"ratio": "1.78",
"file_size": 781731,
"file_type": "image/jpeg",
"created_at": "2021-05-18 19:26:23",
"colors": [
"#424153",
"#000000",
"#663300",
"#996633",
"#999999"
],
"path": "https://w.wallhaven.cc/full/l3/wallhaven-l3zmwy.jpg",
"thumbs": {
"large": "https://th.wallhaven.cc/lg/l3/l3zmwy.jpg",
"original": "https://th.wallhaven.cc/orig/l3/l3zmwy.jpg",
"small": "https://th.wallhaven.cc/small/l3/l3zmwy.jpg"
}
},
...
]
}
So, to get the image path from this, I run:
curl ... | jq -r .data[].path | shuf -n 1 | feh --bg-center
I use shuf because I’d like a new wallpaper every time I run this script.
Put this as the startup script or add a cron job and you’ll have a changing
wallpaper. Disclaimer: this script does not always work, because of feh.
If you’re using GNOME, for example, feh can’t be used to set background.