Gron – Make JSON Greppable

From the FAQ, before someone asks the obvious: Why shouldn't I just use jq? jq is awesome, and a lot more powerful than gron, but with that power comes complexity. gron aims to make it easier to use the tools you already know, like grep and sed. gron's primary purpose is to make it easy to find the path to a value in a deeply nested JSON blob when you don't already know the structure; much of jq's power is…

I use gron a lot, because I can never remember how to use jq to do anything fancy but can usually make awk work. (I may be unusual in that department, in that I actually like awk) One warning to note is that gron burns RAM. I've killed 32GB servers working with 15MB JSON files. (I think gron -u is even worse, but my memory is a bit fuzzy here). https://github.com/adamritter/fastgron as an alternative has been pretty good to me…

This is cool... but it appears to also work as an HTTP client as well? I'm not sure why the additional complexity of including this is needed. I maintain that any HTTP client functionality that supports enough options to be useful is complex and if it supports so few options that it's a toy, why include it? There is non-negligible overhead in keeping track of what shell tools can make network requests, and not being correct and up to date…