Split a JSON file into separate files

Question

I have a large JSON file that is an object of objects, which I would like to split into separate files name after object keys. Is it possible to achieve this using jq or any

Answer 1

Here's a solution that requires only one call to jq:

jq -cr 'keys[] as $k | "\($k)\n\(.[$k])"' input.json |
  while read -r key ; do
    read -r item
    printf "%s\n" "$item" > "/tmp/$key.json"
  done

It might be faster to pipe the output of the jq command to awk, e.g.:

jq -cr 'keys[] as $k | "\($k)\t\(.[$k])"' input.json |
  awk -F\\t '{ print $2 > "/tmp/" $1 ".json" }'

Of course, these approaches will need to be modified if the key names contain characters that cannot be used in filenames.