THthrow0101b·May 30, 2025Submission
Jo: A shell command to create JSON
3 points · Open discussionjpmens
jo
C2016–2025
jpmens / jo
jo
JSON output from a shell
17Distinct people
21Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
JSON output from a shell
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year21 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-03-04 21:24:17 UTC to 2025-05-30 13:52:48 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 4 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
21 sourcesSimilar to jo, which is written in C [1]
[1] https://github.com/jpmens/jo
In Show HN: Jb / json.bash – Command-line tool (and bash library) that creates JSONIn addition to my previous comment about jq-like tools, I want to share a couple other interesting tools, which I use alongside jq are jo [0] and jc [1].
[0]: https://github.com/jpmens/jo
[1]: https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc
In jq 1.7[I'm not recommending this, but maybe… No, no. I'm not sure…]
It isn't even just the newer shells that have solved this, zsh also has a solution out of the box¹. The extensive globbing support in zsh can largely replace `find`, and things like zargs allow you to reuse your common knowledge throughout the shell.
For example, performing your first example with zargs would use regular option separators(`--`), regular expansion(`{1..5}`), and standard shell constructs for the commands to execute.
I'll contrive up an example based around your file counter, but slightly different to show some other functionality.
f() { fs=($1/*(.)); jo $1=$#fs }
zargs -P 32 -n1 -- **/*(/) -- f
That should recursively list directories, counting only the files within each, and output² jsonl that can be further mangled within the shell². You could just
Read the rest
as easily populate an associative array for further work, or $whatever. Unlike bash, zsh has reasonable behaviour around quoting and whitespace too.
Edit to add: I'm not suggesting zargs is a replacement for parallel, but if you're only using a small subset of its functionality then it may be able to replace that.
¹ https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.ht...
² https://github.com/jpmens/jo
³ https://github.com/stedolan/jq
Alternative to jo: https://github.com/jpmens/jo
In Show HN: Jf – json building made easy in the cli - written in rustI'm a big fan of jo[1] for making generating JSON from the shell not terrible.
[1] https://github.com/jpmens/jo
In New(ish) command line toolsDirect link to repo:
https://github.com/jpmens/jo
In Jo – a shell command to create JSON (2016)This. jo (https://github.com/jpmens/jo) solves what this proposal seems to be about.
In The time might come when we add some JSON specific command line optionsJo: Small CLI utility to create JSON objects
3 points · Open discussionIt probably isn't as user friendly as you'd want, but you can reload the playlist by firing commands at a socket. See the "JSON IPC" section in the mpv man page, and specifically the load* commands. jo¹ and socat² are probably the simplest way to use it if you're not looking for heavy scripting.
The scriptability of mpv is really nice if you're the sort of person who likes building your perfect environment, and also a huge pit of addictive time sinks. </warning>
¹ https://github.com/jpmens/jo
² http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/
In Nq – A simple Unix job queue systemThere are tools like jo[1] which will encode output of shell commands into json.
As for native shell support for structured data, Powershell is probably the best implementation.
In Powershell objects can be piped to other commands and they can be serialized to json, xml,
csv, and even html [2]
[1] https://github.com/jpmens/jo
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
In The Origin of the ShellGreat with https://github.com/jpmens/jo
In Gron – Make JSON GreppableSource code on Github: https://github.com/jpmens/jo
Looks like GPL license. Cool!
In A shell command to create JSON: joJo: small utility to create JSON objects from a shell
1 points · Open discussionJo: a small utility to create JSON objects
2 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 21 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.