Maybe you're solving a different problem, but I'm not sure emitting one key-value pair per line is ultimately the way to go: $ echo '[{"a": [{"b": {"c": ["fo

Maybe you're solving a different problem, but I'm not sure emitting one key-value pair per line is ultimately the way to go: $ echo '[{"a": [{"b": {"c": ["foo"]}}]}]' | jsonpipe / [] /0 {} /0/a [] /0/a/0 {} /0/a/0/b {} /0/a/0/b/c [] /0/a/0/b/c/0 "foo" In my own work, I've built up a suite of stream-based nested record processing tools that accept & produce JSON, protocol buffers, and a unix tab-delimited format. For the unix format it's been more useful to stick to the standard one-record-per-line thing, and let the user specify what fields to extract and their order. Here's a depressing example of the fun you can have with new media and old unix tools, to give you some idea: $ mill io -r json -w texty -W fields=in_reply_to_screen_name < tweets.json | \ grep -v -E '^(None|)$' | sort | uniq -c | sed -e 's#^ *##' | \ sort -k1,1 -nr | head -5 258 justinbieber 248 ddlovato 184 gypsyhearttour 164 Logindaband 145 Louis_Tomlinson