/usr/bin/jq: Argument list too long error bash

Question

I want to replace the value in sample json from larger swagger.json file content and it is too large.

Error:
/usr/bin/jq: Argument list too long error bash 
         


        

Answer 1

From your example:

jq -r --arg swagger "$swagger" '.apiDefinition = $swagger' <<<"$json"

I'm assuming you want the output to result in a JSON object with a key "apiDefinition", and its value being set to the content of swagger.json (which contains valid JSON).

In that case this works:

jq -n --slurpfile swagger swagger.json '{"apiDefintion": $swagger[0]}'

The first 10 lines of the resulting output:

{
  "apiDefintion": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "first_name": "Samson",
      "last_name": "Wandrack",
      "email": "swandrack0@hibu.com",
      "gender": "Male",
      "ip_address": "122.171.218.251"
    },

• -n is required in this case, to use the JSON on the command line as the input JSON, rather than reading it from stdin or a file.
• --slurpfile puts the contents of swagger.json into the variable $swagger, as an array.
• -r is not needed, as it has no effect unless the output is just strings (and it's raw output makes it invalid JSON).
• $swagger[0] is used to only include the first item of the slurped array.

From the documentation at https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/:

--null-input/-n:

Don't read any input at all! Instead, the filter is run once using null as the input. This is useful when using jq as a simple calculator or to construct JSON data from scratch.

--slurpfile variable-name filename:

This option reads all the JSON texts in the named file and binds an array of the parsed JSON values to the given global variable. If you run jq with --slurpfile foo bar, then $foo is available in the program and has an array whose elements correspond to the texts in the file named bar.

--raw-output / -r:

With this option, if the filter's result is a string then it will be written directly to standard output rather than being formatted as a JSON string with quotes. This can be useful for making jq filters talk to non-JSON-based systems.