You should Switch From jq to jaq

17 July, 2026 - Tags: sed, jq, rust, jaq, parsing, SRE, command-line

Every software engineer probably already knows and uses jq for parsing and transforming json files. JQ is a great and powerful tool. It's only limitation is that it only works for JSON files.

This is where jaq comes in handy.

Jaq covers almost all, if not all features from JQ, but works not only with JSON, but with JSON, YAML, CBOR, TOML, and XML.

So, switching from jq to jaq is a no-brainer.

Even you're not a rust developer it is a good idea to install rust so that you can install jaq from source:

cargo install jaq

If you're not a security freak like myself who worries perhaps a bit too much about using pre-compiled binaries, you can download the latest (as to the time of this writing) pre-build release v.3.1.0

Now simple replace your calls to jq to jaq, works wonders with TOML and YAML.

For instance, to list the dependencies of a rust crate:

jaq -r '.dependencies' Cargo.toml