If you’re working in a Unix environment within a container isn’t there a high likelihood there already is Python as well?

I never said every single library, also Python scripts can run as standalone executables.

If you truly can’t have Python because it’s too bloated, then JQ in shell scripts is a fair use case, that just sounds so rare.

If you are using whateverq and writing a shell script, everyone else using it needs to have whateverq installed as well....

I was under the assumption that this thing is using it's own parser, I guess it doesn't, idc. The point I'm trying to make is that JQ depends on the user investing the time to know an esoteric domain language. This thing is fed by Go scripts that get interpreted, at that rate just use a powerful shell language like Python.