This blog summarizes jq documentation’s tutorial 1. If you can fully understand what the following command do, you don’t need read the rest of the blog. That’s pretty much sum up all jq can do. curl 'https://api.github.com/repos/stedolan/jq/commits?per_page=5' | jq '[.[] | {message: .commit.message, name: .commit.committer.name, parents: [.parents[].html_url]}]' If you are still confused, read on. There are only 4 concepts in jq shown below. # pipelining jq '.[] | {name: [.key[].childkey]} ' # only apply to list jq '.