Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

jq is incredibly powerful and I'm using it more and more. Even better, there is a whole ecosystem of tools that are similar or work in conjunction with jq:

* jq (a great JSON-wrangling tool)

* jc (convert various tools’ output into JSON)

* jo (create JSON objects)

* yq (like jq, but for YAML)

* fq (like jq, but for binary)

* htmlq (like jq, but for HTML)

List shamelessly stolen from Julia Evans[1]. For live links see her page.

Just a few days ago I needed to quickly extract all JWT token expiration dates from a network capture. This is what I came up with:

    fq 'grep("Authorization: Bearer.*" ) | print' server.pcap | grep -o 'ey.*$' | sort | uniq | \
    jq -R '[split(".") | select(length > 0) | .[0],.[1] | gsub("-";"+") | gsub("_";"/") | @base64d | fromjson]' | \
   jq '.[1]' | jq '.exp' | xargs -n1 -I! date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' -d @! 

It's not a beauty but I find the fact that you can do it in one line, with proper parsing and no regex trickery, remarkable.

[1] https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/04/12/a-list-of-new-ish--command-l...

I would love to see what jq looks like on something like a 1mil line Json vs this. In my experience jq syntax is fine and I've not ran into a performance issue on any one file but I seem to see a jq clone every few months on here so someone seems to need that, or maybe it's just the new volume slider problem who knows.

Marginally faster is better than marginally slower, at least. I agree the JSON use is probably more compelling than their ZNG thing.

PowerShell "sends basic telemetry data to Microsoft [...] about the host running PowerShell, and information about how PowerShell is used" [1].

And since it relies on .NET, that also requires its own separate opt-out for its telemetry. There might be other components, now or in the future, that also send data to Microsoft by default and would have to be separately discovered and disabled.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

These guys must really hate functional programming.

I can see where jq might confuse someone new to it, but their replacement is irregular, stateful, still difficult, and I don't even see variable binding or anything.

jq requires you to understand that `hello|world` will run world for each hello, passing the world out values to either the next piped expression, the wrapping value-collecting list, or printing them to stdout.

it's a bit unintuitive if you come in thinking of them as regular pipelines, but it's a constant in the language that once learned always applies.

this zed thing has what appears to be a series of workarounds for its own awkwardness, where they kept tacking on new forms to try to bandaid those that came before.

additionally, since they made attribute selectors barewords where jq would require a preceding reference to a variable or the current value (.), I'm not sure where they'll go for variables should they add them.