Getting ID of an instance newly launched with ec2-api-tools

Question

I\'m launching an EC2 instance, by invoking ec2-run-instances from simple a bash script, and want to perform further operations on that instance (e.g. associate elastic IP)

Answer 1

http://www.tothenew.com/blog/how-to-parse-json-by-command-line-in-linux/
best tool to parse json in shell

#get instance id 
cat sample.json | jq '.Instances[0].InstanceId'|sed -e 's/^"//' -e 's/"$//' 
#check instances is running or not 
cat status.json | jq '.InstanceStatuses[0].InstanceState.Name'|sed -e 's/^"//' -e 's/"$//'