Well the thing find and test have in common is that they lack a lexer! They abuse the argv array for tokens instead. I might call it the "I'm too lazy to writ

Well the thing find and test have in common is that they lack a lexer! They abuse the argv array for tokens instead. I might call it the "I'm too lazy to write a lexer" pattern :) jq has a lexer and hence a "real" syntax, but so does awk, which is maybe 30 years older. But yes jq is a surprisingly big and rich language, maybe bigger than awk: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/ https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/