Tony Finch – blog

The jq tutorial demonstrates simple filtering and rearranging of JSON data, but lacks any examples of how you might combine jq's more interesting features. So I thought it would be worth writing this up.

I want a list of which zones are in which views in my DNS server. I can get this information from BIND's statistics channel, with a bit of processing.

It's quite easy to get a list of zones, but the zone objects returned from the statistics channel do not include the zone's view.

	$ curl -Ssf http://[::1]:8053/json |
	  jq '.views[].zones[].name' |
	  head -2
	"authors.bind"
	"hostname.bind"

The view names are keys of an object further up the hierarchy.

	$ curl -Ssf http://[::1]:8053/json |
	  jq '.views | keys'
	[
	  "_bind",
	  "auth",
	  "rec"
	]

I need to get hold of the view names so I can use them when processing the zone objects.

The first trick is to_entries which turns the "views" object into an array of name/contents pairs.

	$ curl -Ssf http://[::1]:8053/json |
	  jq -C '.views ' | head -6
	{
	  "_bind": {
	    "zones": [
	      {
	        "name": "authors.bind",
	        "class": "CH",
	$ curl -Ssf http://[::1]:8053/json |
	  jq -C '.views | to_entries ' | head -8
	[
	  {
	    "key": "_bind",
	    "value": {
	      "zones": [
	        {
	          "name": "authors.bind",
	          "class": "CH",

The second trick is to save the view name in a variable before descending into the zone objects.

	$ curl -Ssf http://[::1]:8053/json |
	  jq -C '.views | to_entries |
		.[] | .key as $view |
		.value' | head -5
	{
	  "zones": [
	    {
	      "name": "authors.bind",
	      "class": "CH",

I can then use string interpolation to print the information in the format I want. (And use array indexes to prune the output so it isn't ridiculously long!)

	$ curl -Ssf http://[::1]:8053/json |
	  jq -r '.views | to_entries |
		.[] | .key as $view |
		.value.zones[0,1] |
		"\(.name) \(.class) \($view)"'
	authors.bind CH _bind
	hostname.bind CH _bind
	dotat.at IN auth
	fanf2.ucam.org IN auth
	EMPTY.AS112.ARPA IN rec
	0.IN-ADDR.ARPA IN rec

And that's it!