jq is a command-line JSON processor.

If you want to learn to use jq, read the documentation at http:https://stedolan.github.io/jq. This documentation is generated from the docs/ folder of this repository. You can also try it online at jqplay.org.

If you want to hack on jq, feel free, but be warned that its internals are not well-documented at the moment. Bring a hard hat and a shovel. Also, read the wiki: http:https://github.com/stedolan/jq/wiki

If you're building directly from the latest git, you'll need flex, bison, libtool, make, autoconf and libonig installed. To build, run:

autoreconf -i   # if building from git
./configure
make -j8
make check

To build a statically linked version of jq, run:

make LDFLAGS=-all-static

After make finishes, you'll be able to use ./jq. You can also install it using:

sudo make install

If you're not using the latest git version but instead building a released tarball (available on the website), then you won't need to run autoreconf (and shouldn't), and you won't need flex or bison.

To cross-compile for OS X and Windows, see docs/Rakefile's build task and scripts/crosscompile. You'll need a cross-compilation environment, such as Mingw for cross-compiling for Windows.

Cross-compilation requires a clean workspace, then:

# git clean ...
autoreconf -i
./configure
make distclean
scripts/crosscompile <name-of-build> <configure-options>

Use the --host= and --target= ./configure options to select a cross-compilation environment. See the wiki.