If you do something like single quotes then you can no longer use the shell's abilities to properly pass in escaped values like this: bash$ foo=this\"test\"

If you do something like single quotes then you can no longer use the shell's abilities to properly pass in escaped values like this: bash$ foo=this\"test\" bash$ echo "value of \$foo is: $foo" value of $foo is: this"test" If we're throwing away the ability to let the shell handle escaping properly then there's really no point to --jq at all versus just manually attempting to cobble together JSON directly