I see. I doubt that behavior has changed, then. `-C` would be required when piping because most of the time (with the exception of piping into less) when stdou

I see. I doubt that behavior has changed, then. `-C` would be required when piping because most of the time (with the exception of piping into less) when stdout is not a terminal, it doesn't make sense to include terminal color escape sequences. You'd end up with those codes in your files, and grep would be looking at them for matches, for example. `.` would be required when passing the file as an argument instead of stdin, because jq interprets the first argument as jq-code. If you don't include `.` it would interpret the filename as jq-code.